Factors Affecting Student Performance and Satisfaction: Online versus Traditional Course Delivery

Interest in online course delivery has increased in recent years, and a body of research has emerged regarding this trend. Many of the studies compare student performance online versus in a traditional class (and find none), or differences in student satisfaction (and find online students to be generally less satisfied than their traditional counterparts). The purpose of this study is threefold: (1) to see if careful control between online and traditional sections can alleviate the generally lower satisfaction of online students, (2) to preliminarily propose a set of factors that could lead to increased performance and satisfaction for online students, and (3) to confirm previous work, which indicates that student performance online is no different than performance in a traditional classroom. The study involved senior-level undergraduate MIS students who were enrolled in an E-Business course; results suggest several possible ways to increase student performance and satisfaction in online courses.

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