Students Satisfaction with Online Higher Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The digital educational environment is not new in the modern world, but in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the transition to online learning has become necessary and fast. This offered the possibility to study various characteristics of objects and subjects in the digital educational environment. During the pandemic, universities worldwide were forced to switch to online learning, creating a global educational experiment with results to be comprehended and theoretically reflected upon. The significance of this scientific reflection is important for understanding the characteristics and factors that influence student satisfaction with online learning, as well as for anticipating possible ways to improve its effectiveness. This research aimed to study the characteristics of satisfaction with online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic in connection with the elements of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) online learning model. The study involved 808 students (M = 22.5, SD = 2.4 (53.3% men)) from 6 countries (Serbia—30.8%, Bosnia and Herzegovina—8.5%, Croatia—8.9%, Romania—21.8%, Russia—25.2%, Slovenija—4.7%). A total of 808 students responded to a questionnaire measuring the levels of cognitive, social, and teaching presence in distance learning. Satisfaction with online learning has been shown to positively correlate with cognitive, social and teaching presence, and overall CoI presence. The results of the Kruskal-Wallis test showed that satisfaction with online learning does not differ among students with different levels of academic performance; however, the subjective assessment of the element of social presence “Tools and platforms for online learning allow students to work with each other” is significantly higher among students with low academic performance. Satisfaction with online learning and the elements of the CoI model is different in study groups with varying degrees of online learning presence, as well as different in students whose training included different elements of online learning. The conclusions obtained in this study will make it possible to organize the digital educational environment more effectively by managing the elements of the CoI model.

AI, Analytics and a New Assessment Model for Universities

“…Overall, there were lower levels of engagement compared to in-person lectures, and as Koh and Daniel [52] found, these particularly hampered less motivated students. Finally, in a large study by Arsenijević et al [56] conducted in Russia and five Balkan countries, higher satisfaction levels were associated with the active organisation and management of students' collaborative work. The need to maintain a strong social presence was found to be more important for students with level academic performance, for whom blended learning was also more successful than a fully online delivery model.…”

A Systematic Literature Review on the Relationships between Social Presence, Learning Satisfaction and Persistence in Online Learning

“…Within the surveyed literature, some researchers position it within the CoI framework, examining the connections between cognitive, teaching, and social presence. Some researchers [55] propose a positive correlation between satisfaction with online learning and overall CoI presence, while others, such as [54], suggest that course satisfaction is predicted social and teaching presence. Some scholars, such as [53], concentrate on the CoI framework, and they have found diverse results regarding how selfregulated learning influences these presences in online satisfaction.…”

ICT Engineering Students’ Perceptions on Project-Based Online Learning in Community of Inquiry (CoI)

“…'Zhang et al (2019) found, for example, that timely feedback promotes student participation, as well as progress management, rational arrangement of learning, and online communication and discussions had an encouraging effect on learning. The TP has indeed been found to have also an association with students' satisfaction (see e.g., Arsenijevic et al, 2023;Kyei-Blankson et al, 2019;Tayeh, 2021). In fact, it has been discovered that the TP benefits both SP and CP, as well as indirectly on learning performance as a facilitator of students' cognitive thinking and social interaction (Law et al, 2019).…”