USF St. Petersburg campus Faculty Publications
Target populations for online education.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2006
ISSN
1943-5932
Abstract
For a variety of reasons, a rapidly increasing number of institutions of higher education have started to offer degrees and other educational programs fully online. Most institutions aim their online programs at mature part-time students. The assumption is that the increased convenience and flexibility that online programs offer and the fact that there is no need to attend traditional classroom settings make such programs particularly attractive to this group of students. However, there is relatively little evidence to bear out this assumption. This article describes a survey study addressing this issue. The survey was administered to students enrolled in a face-to-face MBA program, both as full-time and as part-time students. Interestingly, part-time students displayed a greater reluctance to enroll in online courses than full-time students. The survey did unearth some factors that had previously been overlooked and that seemed to more strongly influence students' willingness to enroll in online courses, namely previous knowledge of the topic, access to the instructor, perceived quality of the online courses, and hardware reliability.
Language
en_US
Publisher
Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education
Recommended Citation
Tabatabaei, M., Schrottner, B., & Reichgelt, H. (2006). Target populations for online education. International Journal on E-Learning, 5(3), 401-414.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Comments
Citation only. Full-text article is available through licensed access provided by the publisher. Published in International Journal on E-Learning, 5(3), 401-414. Members of the USF System may access the full-text of the article through the authenticated link provided.