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Teaching and Learning has changed in the 21st century. The Open University established by United Kingdom in year and the first students enrolled in January 1971. At later periods other Traditional Universities have developed online distance courses across the world. Continuing the trend of open learning, the concept of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a recent development which is grabbing the attention from academic as well as corporate world (Kumar & Kumar, 2020). Learning through the digital mode is gaining popularity day by day and professionals are preferring it to upgrade their skill and knowledge (Macleod, Sinclair, Haywood, & Woodgate, 2016). Universities are increasingly turning to online or blended formats to teach required courses. Although offering university courses online provides a number of benefits both to students, who can take courses even from remote locations with the flexibility of studying according to their own schedules, and to universities, which can serve more students without having to physically house the courses (Ghaderizefreh & Hoover, 2018).
Due to huge demand on online learning opportunities, the private institutions are also offering online courses. Students’ world over in the coming years will be using the e - learning tools more than the printed textual material and India is not far behind.
E-learning can be seen as an innovative approach to the delivery of educational services through electronic forms of information that enhance knowledge, skills, and other outcomes of learners (Fazlollahtabar & Muhammadzadeh, 2012). Open Universities in the last more than 20 years have moved from print material to web-based courses for delivery of instruction. With the emergence of new technologies, the Universities have to move fast and keep the pace with the rest of the world.
Online Learning is mainly the transfer of skills and knowledge through computer. The content is delivered via Internet or audio/video or satellite or CDROM. Online education continues to expand at a rate faster than traditional campus-based programs (Cole, Shelley, & Swartz, 2014). One reason for increasing online course offerings is to accommodate more students without incurring significant costs of building new infrastructure (Seaman, Allen, & Seama, 2018).
Customer satisfaction is essential to the success of any business venture and online education is no exception (Wengrowicz, et al., 2018). Satisfaction refers to a range of feelings about a learner’s accomplishments and learning experiences (Bradford, 2011). Learner satisfaction reflects students’ perception of their learning experience (Kuo, Walker, Schroder, & Belland, 2014) (Littlejohn, Hood, Milligan, & Mustain, 2016) and is defined as a student’s overall positive assessment of his or her learning experience (Keller, 1983) (Rabin, Kalman, & Kalz, 2019).
Studies on e-learning also confirms that student satisfaction is very likely to lead to improved student loyalty (Kilburn, Kilburn, & Davis, 2016).
(Swart, Wengrowicz, & Wuensch, 2015) cited several studies that found strong correlations between student satisfaction, learning, and retention. According to (Donohue & Wong, 1997), satisfaction affects the student’s level of motivation. There exist enormous opportunities of research in the area focusing on the factors that affects a learners’ satisfaction to continue the MOOCs. Need arises to study these factors because non-fulfillment of these factors ultimately leads to discontinuance or dropouts (Kumar & Kumar, 2020).
The student satisfaction study conducted at IGNOU by (Parhar, Mythili, & Unnikrishnan, 2010) stated that overall satisfaction of students was concerned of improving upon the quality of programme materials, provision of supplementary learning materials, good counselors, better co-ordination with study centers etc. on the part of University was required for improving upon the satisfaction level of students. (Arbaugh, 2000) argued that learners’ interactions with others in online courses increase their satisfaction with these courses.
Another study shows that “the participants of the online program were satisfied with the information on the website, regular interaction between the teacher and participants, interaction among the participants, e-content available on online portal, support material including video and PowerPoint presentations and content of the response/feedback received from the teacher” (Mythili, 2017).