This article explores the quality of the online learning experience based on the Sloan-C framework and the Online Learning Consortium's (OLC) quality scorecard. The OLC index has been implemented to evaluate quality in online programs from different perspectives. Despite this, the opinions of learners are ignored, and it is built using feedback from experts and panelists while ignoring the factors that teachers consider important during their lectures. We propose an alternative way of measuring the quality of online learning programs by analyzing the satisfaction of the learning experience and using teachers and students' perceptions. The 11 categories composing the index were weighted in the teacher and student indices using principal component analysis, and finally these two indices were linearly combined with a parameter that defines the importance of each body. Findings show that while teachers perceive collaborative learning variables as crucial, learners are more concerned with their own learning benefits.

This paper determines which instructional roles and outputs are important in the 21 st century from the perspective of students in asynchronous learning environments. This research work uses a literature review, in-depth interviews with experts, and a pilot study with students to define the instructors' outputs. Following this, roles are determined by using a quantitative methodology (in a sample of 925 students). To our knowledge, the remaining research works on this topic identify the online instructors' roles by a qualitative analysis. The findings suggest that a new role, the life skill promoter, has emerged. Furthermore, analysis of the remaining roles (pedagogical, designer, social, technical and managerial) showed that: (i) online instructors are, first and foremost, pedagogues; (ii) the design of the particular online program influences the pedagogical and designer roles and; (iii) the managerial role has declined in importance over the years due to the development of more intuitive and transparent online scenarios from the beginning of the course onward.

The topic of online instructors' roles has been of interest to the educational community since the late twentieth century. In previous studies, the identification of online instructors' roles was done using a top-down (deductive) approach. This study applied a bottom-up (inductive) procedure to examine not only the roles of online instructors from a student perspective, but also how well these roles are implemented in practice. In the first stage, roles were defined using factor analysis on a sample of 925 students. A questionnaire was created after an extensive literature review and in-depth interviews with experts. The methodology detected six roles: pedagogical, course designer, social, life skills promoter, technical, and managerial. In the second stage, students' scores were projected over those factors to obtain the instructors' performance in each role (the significance of the results was assessed using non-parametric tests). Main findings included: (i) the emergence of a new role, the life skills promoter; (ii) online scenarios becoming more transparent and intuitive due to syllabus design; (iii) the consideration of more audio-visual resources by instructors in asynchronous learning environments; and (iv) the value of offering guidelines to students for collaborative activities to reduce the level of frustration with these activities.

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