Virtual Communities and the Assessment of Online Marketing Education

Online education has created a “virtual community” learning environment. Effective assessment of this new learning environment is paramount to providing quality education and may provide insights to effective management of virtual communities in the business world. A model of online education effectiveness is proposed and then empirically investigated. Dimensions included in this model are student-to-student interactions, student-to-instructor interactions, instructor support and mentoring, information delivery technology, course content, and course structure. Measures of these dimensions were then analyzed and found to be significant predictors of the variance in students’ evaluations of the global effectiveness of the online educational experience.

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