Factors Leading to a Quality E-Learning Experience

Abstract

The Internet became available to the general public in the mid 1990’s. At that time, a few institutions starting using the net as a vehicle for providing course credit. Since this early time, the number of institutions offering classes and full degrees online has grown exponentially. At one northeastern institution, the growth has been from 4 courses in 1996 to over 500 courses today. At the same time, most institutions now have updated their classrooms with ever more sophisticated technical capabilities, such as access to the Web for presentations, synchronous videos, and clickers for taking class polls. Others use technology as an add-on to the class room creating hybrid, blended, or e-learning experiences. In the late 90’s classes were primarily text based, using either in house developed web pages, and later using self contained course management shells such as WebCT and Blackboard, which required the users to create content, but the linkages and communication tools were self contained. Some authors have developed taxonomies to look at quality [media richness, student interaction, etc.], but not enough has been done to compare online learning and e-learning to traditional classroom based learning. The contribution of this paper will be to report on the findings of previous studies relating to the assessment of online course delivery and the online component of blended learning classes. The results of the research findings should provide significant contributions to the performance improvement of e-learning.