A Comparison of Faculty and Undergraduate Students' Perceptions of Online Courses and Degree Programs

Journal of Information Systems Education, Summer 2006 by Wilkes, Ronald B, Simon, Judith C, Brooks, Lloyd D

This instrument was administered to 179 undergraduate business students at a large urban university. The instrument was distributed and collected in classrooms so 100% were collected. The responses of one participant were determined to be unusable, resulting in 178 usable responses. These students are assumed to be likely customers for college-level online courses and represent a large potential target market.

2.1.1 Demographics: Information was gathered regarding the grade levels and the majors of the student participants. The participants represented all departments in the business school and all undergraduate classifications. These results are not reported in more detail here since no statistically significant differences were found along these demographic dimensions.

All but one of the survey respondents indicated their gender. There were approximately an equal number of female and male students, as shown in Table 1.

All but one of the survey respondents indicated their grade level. Student grade level distribution is shown in Table 2. In a standard U.S. undergraduate program; Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, and Senior equate to first, second, third, and fourth year respectively.

2.1.2 Current Status Regarding Taking Online Courses: Students were asked to describe their current status regarding taking a course online and were allowed to select more than one response. One male subject did not respond to this section, and one subject who did respond to this section did not specify gender. As shown in Table 3, fewer than one-fifth of the respondents indicated that they would not take an online course. Not surprisingly, very few had already taken or were currently taking a course online. The percentage of females who indicated that they "would not take a course online" is almost double the percentage of males who indicated this choice. And the percentage of females who indicated that they "would like to take a course online" is less than two thirds the percentage of males. This same pattern of bias among females away from online courses (or bias of males toward online courses) is shown in responses to "I plan to take a course online." Oddly, the number of females who have completed a course online is double the number of males in this sample, and this gap is increasing based on the relative number of females to males who are currently taking a course online. An analysis of variance was conducted to determine whether these observed differences in means are significant. The results of the ANOVA are shown in Table 3. Only one issue, "I would not take a course online" was significant at the 95% confidence level. The implications of this apparent gender difference warrant further study.

2.1.3 Ratings of Issues' Importance: The remainder of the survey had two parts, each with a listing of the 27 issues for students to consider. In the first section, students were asked to indicate how important each identified issue was to them in deciding whether to take a course online or in an oncampus environment. A Likert-type scale was used, with 1 representing "not at all important" and 5 representing "extremely important." A mean was calculated as a basis for determining which issues were considered rather important (defined as a mean of at least 4.0). A majority of the issues had means below 4.0, but only one had a mean below 3.0 (opportunity for communication between faculty and students outside normal class times). The five issues of highest importance are shown in Table 4.