Developing an Analytical Framework to Compare Students’ Experiences of Online Learning with Indicators of Good Online Learning Site Design

Abstract

Improving the student educational experience is the purpose of many scholarly studies of learning and teaching. While these studies have great value, there is still a need to further explore, beyond the conceptual, the relationship between what is pedagogically considered as ‘good’ elements of online learning design and what is experienced as ‘good’ learning. This paper presents a study that contributes to this gap by combining an inductive evaluation of online course design with a deductive analysis of students’ level of satisfaction with their learning experiences. This comparison aimed to determine whether students’ experiences align with educators’ and learning designers’ definitions of 'good’ online learning. The paper provides a discussion of the study’s design, which compared findings from students’ feedback on their online subject units and the quality of the sites hosting these units determined using a validated design checklist. It provides an example of the framework’s application and the results in the context of an Australian metropolitan university business school.