Predicting Student Satisfaction in Distance Learning Environments

Learning takes place wherever a human being exists. It is not limited to time or place. That's why distance learning was created and now is an embedded part of the educational system. It is appreciated by many scholars around the world because of the opportunities it offers. However, it has affected the teaching methods, students and teachers expectations, and interactions. Also, it has a great impact on the student satisfaction. This satisfaction can be upon the student himself (self satisfaction), the teacher, the environment, the atmosphere in the class, the interactions, the facilities, the learning scale, and also the students' grades and evaluations. Some research has been done based on these criteria. The present study's pattern was adopted from Ismail Sahin (2007). He conducted his study in the Anatolian University in Turkey and came to this conclusion that there's a relationship between student satisfaction and the four factors he mentioned. This paper mainly focuses upon the prediction and measurement of satisfaction among the students in a distance learning environment. To this end, 100 students of the distance learning center at Shiraz University participated in our research and did the questionnaires. The questions included different factors and the students answering the questions, showed how much, these items were performing in their studies. The students were from different majors passing the general English course. The data collected from the questionnaires were examined using factor analysis in Spss 16.0. Accordingly, the result of this paper was in line with what Sahin (2007) had concluded in Turkey. We came to this conclusion that the four factors (instructor support, student interaction and collaboration, personal relevance, authentic learning, active learning, and student autonomy) affect satisfaction among the students of distance learning environment. So as Sahin (2007) had also suggested, the characteristics of the distance learning environment is of great importance and should be considered by the instructors because it has a great impact on the students and their learning scale.

Keywords:

Student satisfaction , distance learning environment , distance education