This quantitative study investigated the determinants of students’ satisfaction with their online learning experience at Sri Lankan universities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The data was collected from 1376 undergraduates enrolled in various courses in humanities and social sciences at three state-owned universities in the country. The results of the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) revealed that the independent variables of the model, namely perceived learner motivation, perceived challenges of e-learning, and interaction significantly affected students’ satisfaction with their new online learning experience. Out of the three variables, learner motivation exerted the strongest effect on students’ satisfaction, implying the crucial role self-regulated learning—characterized by motivation—plays in online learning environments. The study has several implications for both creating and ensuring the long-term sustainability of productive and student-friendly online learning spaces in higher education.

The core objective of this study is to explore the feasibility of farmers' organizations (FOs) as a vehicle for micro-insurance delivery of the paddy crop, grown by small-scale (peasant) farmers in Sri Lanka. Factor Analysis was used to elicit the group dynamic and the capacity of FOs as a stakeholder in the insurance supply chain. The results show that the farmers' organizations are most widespread and are a very close institutional setup for paddy farmers because FOs are capable of handling financial activities with transparency, and have healthy financial habits and as a result farmers participate actively in farmers' organization activities. This study provided clear policy insights for the policy makers to implement an innovative business model for micro-insurance delivery to be incorporated with the FO model in Sri Lanka. Furthermore, it was revealed that the postal network can act as a financial intermediary in circumstances to assist the FOs in financial activities, where the commercial insurers do not have an outlet or branch networks in their target area. Therefore, in order to develop the links between the farmers and the insurers, it seems viable that the public-private partnership model be used for micro-insurance supply to paddy farmers in Sri Lanka.

This paper is aimed at examining the relationship between risk tolerance behaviour and the education investment of families in different social sectors, i.e. urban, rural, and estate, in Sri Lanka. At the initial step, the study used Binary Logistic Regression for identifying the significant variables for financial risk tolerance and for household investment on education. Having identified the two sets of variables for each domain, the second step was to apply the Canonical Analysis in order to examine the association between risk tolerance behaviour and education investment. The data for the study was obtained from a sample survey conducted in six Divisional Secretariat Divisions (DSDs) of three districts in Sri Lanka. The sample was selected considering the social sectors as strata, using multi-stage sampling technique joined with cluster sampling. The study found that ‘social sector’ and ‘education of household head’ were the main contributors to ‘household investment on education’. It revealed that when the ‘social sector’ changes from urban to rural and rural to estate there is a tendency of households to decrease the share of expenditure on education. However, the ‘education level of the household head’ had s significant positive impact for the investment in education. It also found that ‘income quartile, decision maker’, ‘income diversification’, and ‘financial literacy’ positively contributed to ‘risk tolerance behaviour’. However, the findings show that financial risk tolerance decreases with the distance of households to a financial institute. The canonical relationship shows a negative association between ‘income quartile’ and the ‘social sector’ and the ‘income quartile’ improves with the change of the ‘social sector’ from estate to rural and rural to urban. It also revealed that ‘income quartile’ was positively associated with the ‘education of the household head’. A primary conclusion can be arrived at that income and spatial related attributes are crucial in determining the impact of risk tolerance in household education investment. In addition, the study revealed that risk tolerance and, in turn, the tendency to invest in education increases with the change of gender from female to male. Therefore, it suggests that gender related attributes are also important in the financial risk tolerance and education investment.

The main objective of this study is to explore, from a demand perspective, the feasibility of an index-based microinsurance scheme (IBMS) for paddy crop cultivated by small-scale (peasant) farmers in Sri Lanka to protect them against the production loss caused by natural disasters. The contingent valuation method (CV) has been used to elicit the insurance demands (i.e. willingness to pay) for the hypothetical IBMS. The results show that the interest in joining IBMS is 88% (SD=2.4%) overall and the strongest influence factors on farmers' willingness to join are age, total household expenditure and, awareness of crop insurance. However, willingness to pay determinantvaries significantly on spatial and insurance contracts, indicatinga potential for a discriminating and flexible policy in the insurance scheme. This means that insurance policies concerning crop insurance product should be designed and implemented with synergies of different approaches in microinsurance, rather than as a uniform structure.