Enhancing College Students’ Satisfaction and Learning Interest When the Teacher Uses a Web-based Platform While Teaching

Abstract

This study investigated the relationship of students’ satisfaction and learning interest when the teacher used a web-based learning platform. Participants were drawn from a tertiary institution in central Taiwan, ages ranging between 19 to 24 years old taken from two departments, the Department of Applied English and the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering. Three hundred and two participants completed an online questionnaire, but only 225 questionnaires were valid when the data was analyzed. Data analysis was conducted descriptively, Pearson correlation, and ANOVA were computed to determine the answers to research questions posted in this study. The results of this study showed that students’ satisfaction and learning interest when using a web-based learning platform were positively correlated at a significant level. The outcome could be thereby interpreted as the more a teacher used a web-based learning platform in teaching instruction; the more likely the students were satisfied with the class which also impacted their learning interest. Also, the results showed only students’ satisfaction significantly differed in the aspect of students’ ages. However, the results did not show statistical significance regarding gender and department. This result can be interpreted that no matter what the gender or major, students’ experience of using a web-based learning platform for learning English was positive and valuable. In-depth discussions and pedagogical implications are addressed in the paper. At the end, the limitations of this study and future research directions are discussed as well.