Assessing Online Learning: What One University Learned about Student Success, Persistence, and Satisfaction

Peer Review, Fall 2006 by Moskal, Patsy, Dziuban, Charles, Upchurch, Randall, Hartman, Joel, Truman, Barbara

Online learning is a contributing factor in a number of innovations in higher education. Students will continue to integrate their personal technologies into their educational and social lives, and creative faculty members will respond in innovative ways to keep our current generation actively engaged in learning. Institutional support is the key to maintaining the quality of these efforts. Students will learn online through course managements systems, mobile devices, and remote access. In addition, they will use their devices for forming social networks and entertaining themselves. The challenge for higher educators and administrators is to stay ahead of the curve, recognizing that educational technology expands more rapidly than anything else that we have encountered and can morph into educational forms that we have not anticipated. Although online learning has been a part of the educational landscape for only a few years, the evidence to date suggests that it is rapidly becoming a major component ofl higher education.

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By Patsy Moskal, associate director, Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness; Charles Dziuban, director, Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness; Randall Upchurch, director, Center for Distributed Learning; Joel Hartman, vice provost, information technologies and resources; and Barbara Truman, director of course development and Web services within the Division of Information Technology and Resources-all of University of Central Florida