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Perceptions of Online Strategies and Digital Readiness in the COVID-19 Environment: An Instrumental Case Study
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted higher education, forcing institutions to rapidly transition from traditional face-to-face (F2F) learning to online learning environments. This sudden shift has presented significant challenges for graduate students, faculty, and administrators because of limited training and support for implementing innovative strategies and technologies. These challenges lead to an imbalance in the operational environment, disrupting classroom instruction and creating anxiety from the additional workload supporting complex and uncertain environments. The design for this research project was an instrumental case study focusing on one private University in South Central Texas designated as a Hispanic Serving Institution (HIS). Our population for this case included University graduate students, faculty, and administrators in the school of education from the Summer of 2021 through the Spring of 2022. Data were collected and analyzed using Miles and Huberman’s code-to-theory framework to identify categories, themes, and develop a Comprehensive Institutional Model (CIM) to support the transition to remote and blended modalities in graduate education. This instrumental case study also highlights the need for universities to invest in reliable and up-to-date Information Communication Technology (ICT) platforms, provide accessible training, and develop sustainability strategies and plans. Ultimately, the success of online learning depends on instructional support, instructor presence, and engagement. Universities must work to ensure that all stakeholders are ready for teaching and learning in this new environment.
... This instrumental case study is a continuing pilot study that explores the efficacy of the CIM, a conceptual framework developed to assist HEIs in addressing the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic within Blended Learning (BL) HyFlex environments [9], [10], [17]. The CIM was constructed from over two years (2021-2023) of longitudinal pilot study data and offers detailed recommendations aimed at improving teaching effectiveness, encouraging investments in reliable instructional technology and operational infrastructure, delivering graduate student academic support functions, and executing institutional sustainability actions across three institutional stakeholder groups: administrators, faculty, and graduate students. ...
... The research questions examined if and how the CIM enhanced faculty readiness, encouraged investments in instructional technology and training, supported graduate student academic needs, and addressed institutional sustainability expectations [9], [10]. Study participant feedback on the model's cyclical communication loops, facilitating iterative feedback on the CIM's focused educational interventions for BL HyFlex adoption amongst the stakeholders, was also collected as part of the dialogue. ...
... As previously discussed, these findings continue the pilot study conducted during the pandemic environment (2021-2023). They serve as a bridge to a broader dissertation study that further examines how the CIM's stakeholderfocused educational interventions and cyclical communication loops improve teaching effectiveness, encourage investment in reliable instructional technology, deliver graduate student academic support functions, and support institutional sustainability in the post-COVID era [9], [10]. The DBR process was instrumental in gathering and iteratively analyzing the current study data to assess the impact of the CIM's stakeholder-focused educational interventions on BL HyFlex adoption and juxtaposing them against the pilot studying findings [3], [14], [17]. ...
This paper provides an overview of the preliminary findings for a study that is a continuation of a pilot study conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. These findings contribute to a broader dissertation study, which evaluates the effectiveness of the Comprehensive Institutional Model (CIM) in the post-COVID-19 HyFlex environment. Initially developed to assist Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in navigating the challenges of Blended Learning (BL) during the pandemic, the CIM remains relevant as institutions transition into the post-pandemic era. The preliminary results highlight how the CIM’s stakeholder-focused educational strategies can improve teaching effectiveness, drive investment in robust instructional technologies, enhance graduate student support services, and ensure institutional sustainability. The dissertation study further explores the impact of the CIM’s cyclical communication loops in promoting ongoing dialogue among administrators, faculty, and graduate students at a private university in South Central Texas. Four key themes emerged to inform the broader dissertation research by analyzing post-COVID-19 data collected from personal interviews, HyFlex classroom observations, course design audits, institutional metadata, and researcher reflections.
... This study will help close these gaps and add to the existing knowledge base by testing the efficacy of the CIM using Reeves' DBR methodology [18], [32]. The CIM specifically builds on the case study findings of Perceptions of Online Strategies and Digital Readiness in the COVID-19 Environment: An Instrumental Case Study by McCray et al. (2023) [19], which examines one private University's efforts to transition from primarily face to face (F2F) graduate education courses to a fully online modality during the pandemic. The CIM, built on two years of longitudinal data, provides step-by-step actions to guide HEI administrators, faculty, and graduate students in addressing post-COVID-19 challenges [19]. ...
... This study will help close these gaps and add to the existing knowledge base by testing the efficacy of the CIM using Reeves' DBR methodology [18], [32]. The CIM specifically builds on the case study findings of Perceptions of Online Strategies and Digital Readiness in the COVID-19 Environment: An Instrumental Case Study by McCray et al. (2023) [19], which examines one private University's efforts to transition from primarily face to face (F2F) graduate education courses to a fully online modality during the pandemic. The CIM, built on two years of longitudinal data, provides step-by-step actions to guide HEI administrators, faculty, and graduate students in addressing post-COVID-19 challenges [19]. ...
... The CIM specifically builds on the case study findings of Perceptions of Online Strategies and Digital Readiness in the COVID-19 Environment: An Instrumental Case Study by McCray et al. (2023) [19], which examines one private University's efforts to transition from primarily face to face (F2F) graduate education courses to a fully online modality during the pandemic. The CIM, built on two years of longitudinal data, provides step-by-step actions to guide HEI administrators, faculty, and graduate students in addressing post-COVID-19 challenges [19]. ...
COVID-19 was a “black swan” event that forever altered higher education’s adult teaching and learning landscape by requiring a pathway shift in institutional resources to meet student and faculty support needs for academic success and institutional sustainability. Over the last two years, thousands of scholarly articles have been published about the challenges that higher education institutions (HEIs) faced during COVID-19 and their lasting impact on student learning, faculty engagement, and institutional operations in the post-COVID environment. Many researchers offer strategies and guidance to help address the challenges; however, research is limited to testing these strategies and proposed models designed to mitigate the challenges and manage such a crisis in the future. The proposed study will help close this gap by assessing the efficacy of the Comprehensive Institutional Model (CIM), developed based on the findings of Perceptions of Online Strategies and Digital Readiness in the COVID-19 Environment: An Instrumental Case Study by McCray et al. [19]. The CIM aims to provide HEIs with a model to support Hy-flex learning environments to ensure readiness for new emergencies and the aftermath of a “new normal” in higher education. The model organizes how aligning administrators, faculty, and graduate students impacts effective Hy-flex teaching and learning environments. Design-Based Research (DBR) will be used to systematically collect and analyze evidence-based testing results of the CIM across three iterations.
Predictions about the post‐pandemic future of digital learning vary among higher education scholars. Some foresee dramatic, revolutionary change while others speculate that growth in educational technology will be buffeted both by modest expansion and unevenness. To this debate we contribute evidence from four groups across six countries on four continents: college and university educators (n = 281), students (n = 4243), senior administrators (n = 15), and instructional design specialists (n = 43). Our focus is on the future of digital learning after the pandemic‐induced pivot to emergency remote instruction. Using data from interviews and self‐administered questionnaires, our findings reveal a high degree of congruency between respondent groups, with most envisioning more blended/hybrid instruction post‐pandemic and some modest increases in fully online courses. Student opinion is more sceptical about future change than within the other groups. Among respondents in all groups there is little expectation for a full‐blown, revolutionary change in online or digital learning.
Practitioner notes
What is already known about this topic Digital learning has been growing in higher education, although a digital disconnect continues whereby the availability of educational technology exceeds its application to learning.
Expectations regarding technology‐mediated learning post‐COVID‐19 are mixed, hampering planning for the future.
Hesitancy about teaching or taking courses with some or full online components persists.
What this paper adds A strong majority of respondents in higher education foresee the most growth in blended/hybrid forms of digital learning post‐COVID‐19.
A solid percentage, between about two‐thirds and three‐quarters of faculty and students, envision learners and instructors taking or teaching more fully online courses post‐pandemic.
A strong congruency exists between faculty, students, senior administrators, and instructional design professionals in their ranking of scenarios for the future of digital learning.
Implications for practice and/or policy Educational technology in higher learning will not return to a pre‐COVID‐19 normality—if a pre‐COVID‐19 ‘normal’ could even be defined.
As post‐pandemic institutional planning unfolds, it is important to reflect experiences and incorporate insights of instructors, students, and instructional designers.
Successfully building on these insights, where more blended/hybrid learning is foreseen, requires a thoughtful integration of face‐to‐face learning and educational technology.
The COVID‐19 pandemic has posed a significant challenge to higher education and forced academic institutions across the globe to abruptly shift to remote teaching. Because of the emergent transition, higher education institutions continuously face difficulties in creating satisfactory online learning experiences that adhere to the new norms. This study investigates the transition to online learning during Covid‐19 to identify factors that influenced students' satisfaction with the online learning environment. Adopting a mixed‐method design, we find that students' experience with online learning can be negatively affected by information overload, and perceived technical skill requirements, and describe qualitative evidence that suggest a lack of social interactions, class format, and ambiguous communication also affected perceived learning. This study suggests that to digitalize higher education successfully, institutions need to redesign students' learning experience systematically and re‐evaluate traditional pedagogical approaches in the online context.
Practitioner notes
What is already known about this topic
University transitions to online learning during the Covid‐19 pandemic were undertaken by faculty and students who had little online learning experience.
The transition to online learning was often described as having a negative influence on students' learning experience and mental health.
Varieties of cognitive load are known predictors of effective online learning experiences and satisfaction.
What this paper adds
Information overload and perceptions of technical abilities are demonstrated to predict students' difficulty and satisfaction with online learning.
Students express negative attitudes towards factors that influence information overload, technical factors, and asynchronous course formats.
Communication quantity was not found to be a significant factor in predicting either perceived difficulty or negative attitudes.
Implications for practice and/or policy
We identify ways that educators in higher education can improve their online offerings and implementations during future disruptions.
We offer insights into student experience concerning online learning environments during an abrupt transition.
We identify design factors that contribute to effective online delivery, educators in higher education can improve students' learning experiences during difficult periods and abrupt transitions to online learning.
The world‐wide pivot to remote learning due to the exogenous shocks of COVID‐19 across educational institutions has presented unique challenges and opportunities. This study documents the lived experiences of instructors and students and recommends emerging pathways for teaching and learning strategies post‐pandemic. Seventy‐one instructors and 122 students completed online surveys containing closed and open‐ended questions. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted, including frequencies, chi‐square tests, Welch Two‐Samples t ‐tests, and thematic analyses. The results demonstrated that with effective online tools, remote learning could replicate key components of content delivery, activities, assessments, and virtual proctored exams. However, instructors and students did not want in‐person learning to disappear and recommended flexibility by combining learning opportunities in in‐person, online, and asynchronous course deliveries according to personal preferences. The paper concludes with future directions and how the findings influenced our planning for Fall 2021 delivery. The video abstract for this article is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F48KBg_d8AE .
Practitioner notes
What is already known about this topic
Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) allowed institutions across the world to continue teaching and learning at all levels of education during the COVID‐19 pandemic. However, this form of delivery, created under conditions of uncertainty, was developed out of an urgency to keep education going rather than maintaining it at the same level.
What this paper adds
This study comes after ERT, and is situated between ERT and the return to campus, with some social distancing restrictions still active, in a delivery method widely viewed as “remote delivery”.
This is a case study of an entire Canadian higher education institution that implemented remote learning for over one full academic year, documenting and examining instructors' and students' experiences and challenges of the remote learning course delivery format.
Quantitative and qualitative data were collected to provide a holistic overview of instructors' and students' experiences of delivery method and assessments including the use of face‐tracking proctoring software.
Implications for practice and/or policy
Compared to ERT, remote delivery was a thoughtful and deliberate way to transform in‐person courses into virtual learning experiences.
Instructors and students were able to successfully replicate many features of in‐person learning and assessments experiences in remote delivery of courses by using effective online tools to teach and learn.
As a result, instructors and students called for the use of elements of remote delivery to create more flexible learning opportunities by combining in‐person, live streaming, and asynchronous learning options.
The aim of this paper is to describe and analyze the response to COVID-19 and evolution through different models of online instruction during the pandemic at a large Canadian university. This paper primarily focuses on the approach taken by the Faculty of Education including the necessary restructuring of the processes, organization of the workforce, support configurations, and institutional constraints. The factors that impacted changes in the curriculum are examined. Three distinct phases were identified and compared: 1) remote teaching, 2) fully online using a combination of synchronous and asynchronous instruction, and 3) a diversity of hybrid approaches. The paper highlights a number of challenges experienced with online education during the pandemic. Each one of them presents both barriers and opportunities. The process has made way for a potential transformation of educational practice at North American universities. This will likely come as a combination of increased knowledge and practice of online learning during the pandemic, and as a need to reshape traditional institutional structures to reflect the shifted landscape of education. It has opened discussions on equity and accessibility, learner-centered design, and the potential for change in the classroom and educational programming.
In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of students have been affected by the closure of educational institutions. This has forced a shift from face-to-face to distance education, facing numerous emergency educational measures, such as online assessment. This study aims to present a systematic review of the literature on the impact of assessment in higher education during the pandemic. The study has followed the methodology set out in the PRISMA statement, and includes 13 studies selected from a total of 51. The results indicate that faculty and students have faced numerous challenges in moving to virtual environments; on the faculty side the lack of training in online assessment techniques is the main problem, on the students’ side there is dishonesty and misconduct. However, it is concluded that continuous assessment, not focused on exams, but in a more qualitative way is the best way to assess at a distance.
The COVID‐19 pandemic situation has pushed many higher education institutions into a fast‐paced, and mostly unstructured, emergency remote education process. In such an unprecedented context, it is important to understand how technology is mediating the educational process and how teachers and students are experiencing the change brought by the pandemic. This research aims to understand how the learning was mediated by technology during the early stages of the pandemic and how students and teachers experienced this sudden change. Data were collected following a qualitative research design. Thirty in‐depth and semi‐structured interviews (20 students and 10 teachers) were obtained and analysed following a thematic analysis approach. Results provide evidence on the adoption of remote education technologies due to the pandemic with impacts on the education process, ICT platforms usage and personal adaptation. The emergency remote education context led to mixed outcomes regarding the education process. Simultaneously, ICT platforms usage was mostly a positive experience and personal adaptation was mostly a negative experience. These results bring new insights for higher education organizations on actions they could take, such as curating the learning experience with standard, institutional‐wide platforms, appropriate training for students and teachers, and suitable remote evaluation practices.
Practitioner notes
What is already known about this topic
The COVID‐19 pandemic has pushed the world's education environment into an unstructured, emergency remote education process.
There is a lack of understanding of how ICT tools mediated learning during pandemic's early stages and how actors experienced this sudden change.
In technology‐mediated learning contexts, participant beliefs, knowledge, practices and the environment mutually influence one another and affect the lived experience.
What this paper adds
The paper identifies and characterizes the educational process, the technological tools used in this new educational setting and personal adaptation of higher education students and teachers during these unprecedented times.
The results show the following: an increase in teacher–student interaction (outside classes), new opportunities and content development; difficulties in control evaluation fraud, constraints in attaining the desired learning outcomes and lack of training; resilience to adapt and adopt the new technologies, despite the negative personal experience lived in terms of productivity, motivation, workload and mental health.
Implications for practice and/or policy
The paper makes evidence‐based recommendations on how higher education institutions can leverage this experience to prepare for future disruptions and increase the use of ICT tools in their regular learning environment.
The outbreak of the COVID‐19 pandemic has changed education dramatically, with the sudden shift from face‐to‐face to emergency remote teaching. Online learning environments may facilitate data‐driven instructional process; yet, our understanding regarding data‐driven decisions is still limited. This quantitative study examined types of learners' data that higher education instructors have access to, are interested in, and decisions they would consider making upon exposure to, while comparing emergency remote teaching with traditional teaching. Data were collected via an online questionnaire distributed among higher education instructors during the first COVID‐19 outbreak (N = 195, affiliated with 108 different academic institutions in 35 countries). Instructors were requested to refer to a face‐to‐face course that was shifted under these emergency circumstances to online teaching. Findings indicated a broader access to learners' data while teaching the course face‐to‐face and a slightly greater interest in learners' data while teaching the course in an emergency remote teaching mode. These complimentary findings depict a situation in which instructors lack face‐to‐face cues about their students without accessing alternative sources of data. Moreover, when teaching online versus face‐to‐face, instructors showed more interest and higher intention to make decisions based on data about learners' collaborative learning and social and emotional support, which highlights instructors' interest in aspects of learning that are less visible during online teaching.
Practitioner notes
What is already known about this topic
Evidence regarding the vital role of the instructor in online courses.
Online learning environments collect digital traces of learners.
Learners' data may assist in the improvement of teaching by implementing data‐driven decision making.
Evidence that the COVID‐19 pandemic revealed a major liability in preparation and training for online teaching.
The understanding of instructors' perspectives regarding the process of data‐driven decisions, especially in times of ERT, is still limited.
What this paper adds
We highlight instructors' perceived access to, interest in, and willingness to make decisions based on learners' data.
We take a within‐subject approach for determining instructors' perceptions of learners' data during ERT compared with face‐to‐face teaching.
We bring evidence to instructors' lesser access to (despite learners' digital traces), and greater interest in, learners' data during ERT.
We bring evidence to instructors' higher inclination towards making data‐driven decisions during ERT, due to lack of F2F evidence.
We bring evidence to a strong correlation between instructors' interest in learners' data and willingness to make data‐driven decisions.
Implications for practice and/or policy
Instructors should be trained for socio‐emotional support for students in times of ERT.
Higher education institutions should collect data on learners' socio‐emotional status in times of ERT.
Policies of data collection in educational institutions should be formed jointly with instructors.
Hectic times of ERT force higher education policymakers to rethink their academic paradigm regarding online as well as F2F pedagogical practices.
COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted teaching in a vriety of institutions. It has tested the readiness of academic institutions to deal with such abrupt crisis. Online learning has become the main method of instruction during the pandemic in Jordan. After 4 months of online education, two online surveys were distributed to investigate faculty’s and Students’ perception of the learning process that took place over that period of time with no face to face education. In this regard, the study aimed to identify both faculty’s and students’ perceptions of online learning, utilizing two surveys one distributed to 50 faculty members and another 280 students were selected randomly to explore the effectiveness, challenges, and advantages of online education in Jordan. The analysis showed that the common online platforms in Jordan were Zoom, Microsoft Teams offering online interactive classes, and WhatsApp in communication with students outside the class. The study found that both faculty and students agreed that online education is useful during the current pandemic. At the same time, its efficacy is less effective than face-to-face learning and teaching. Faculty and students indicated that online learning challenges lie in adapting to online education, especially for deaf and hard of hearing students, lack of interaction and motivation, technical and Internet issues, data privacy, and security. They also agreed on the advantages of online learning. The benefits were mainly self-learning, low costs, convenience, and flexibility. Even though online learning works as a temporary alternative due to COVID-19, it could not substitute face-to-face learning. The study recommends that blended learning would help in providing a rigorous learning environment.
This study examined academic teachers’ agency and emergency responses, prompted by the physical closure of universities and university colleges due to the COVID-19 crisis. The pandemic-related lockdown accelerated the digitalisation of education and forced teachers to adjust their teaching. A theoretical model is elucidated, in which teachers’ agency is understood as the willingness to engage in iterational, practicalevaluative, projective, and transformative action despite the existence of practical, personal and institutional constraints. We explored the nature and degree of this agency through a survey of university teachers in Norway in the first month of the lockdown. Teachers attempted to create learning environments that facilitated knowledge transfer and interaction and sought to solve problems through self-help and support from colleagues and network, although many struggled with insufficiently developed digital competence and institutional support. Latent profile and qualitative analyses revealed different clusters of teacher responses, from strong resistance to online teaching through to transformation of teaching practices. Qualitative analyses unveiled different expressions of teachers’ agency, both ostensible and occlusive, whereby action was shaped by constraining circumstances. These findings can inform future studies of online teaching, indicate the conditions for development of teachers’ digital competence, and illustrate the challenges brought about by crises.
Background/purpose – Besides many psychological, sociocultural, political, and economic problems, the COVID-19 pandemic has also led to radical changes in education systems worldwide, and the current pandemic has probably revealed the biggest education crisis in human history. The COVID-19 pandemic also offered significant opportunities to redesign higher education and to develop and implement effective teaching-learning strategies. The purpose of this article is to discuss the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on higher education from a global perspective.
Materials/methods – This paper is a review article; presenting a brief literature review on the COVID-19 pandemic and higher education.
Practical implications – This article is aimed at inspiring both researchers and practitioners with regards to future research perspectives on COVID-19 and higher education. In this context, the responses of higher education institutions to the global education crisis caused by the current pandemic were examined, and some solution proposals were developed for policymakers and higher education professionals.
Conclusion – The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the worldwide education community acknowledging the fact that urgent adoption of an online emergency remote teaching approach was both necessary and inevitable.
Purpose
Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak has utterly disrupted the worldwide education system and compelled an emergency immersion of unplanned and rapid online teaching-learning. The online teaching readiness would highly depend on the competencies of teachers and skills to adapt the pedagogy and new roles by the teachers. In this context, this study aims to assess higher education institutions (HEIs) teachers’ readiness to handle online education based on the online teaching readiness competencies model.
Design/methodology/approach
A structured questionnaire has been adopted to survey and collect data from 296 teachers of HEIs across India. The questionnaire consisted of 29 constructs. The constructs in this section were measured using a five-point Likert scale ranging. In the first step first-order confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) is carried out, by using the software IBM AMOS-26. The initial model is generated for five constructs and outcomes are used to analyze the model’s goodness of fit and construct validity. In the second step structural equation modeling (SEM) is carried out to do the path analysis of the proposed model.
Findings
The findings connote that the level of course design competencies, communication competencies, time management competencies are not sufficient among the teachers of HEI of India, whereas the technical competencies possessed by the teachers meet the requirements for readiness to handle online education. The research is an attempt to provide possible explanations for establishing relationships between the constructs and discusses the usage of information, which can be further used to enhance the online teaching readiness competencies for the teachers of HEIs of India.
Practical implications
The research is an attempt to provide possible explanations for establishing relationships between the constructs and discusses the usage of information, which can be further used to enhance the online teaching readiness competencies for the teachers of HEIs of India.
Originality/value
Teachers’ competencies are a vital part of teaching online which has become the need of the hour in this COVID-19 outbreak. Because of the need for emergency response and strategies to minimize learning disruption at higher education, the study identifies the online teaching readiness competencies possessed by the online teaching communities and provides guidelines to enhance their capacity to build up the longer-term resilience of education systems. The study will be a ready reckoner for online training competencies which can be used as training need analysis to make each teacher highly competent to impart knowledge using online teaching platforms.
Crisis requires society to renew itself, albeit in a disruptive way. The current Covid-19 pandemic is transforming ways of working, living, and relating to each other on a global level, suddenly and dramatically. This paper focuses on the field of education to show how higher education institutions are undergoing radical transformations driven by the need to digitalize education and training processes in record time with academics who lack innate technological capabilities for online teaching. The university system must strive to overcome this situation to be competitive and provide high-quality education in a scenario of digital transformation, disruptive technological innovations, and accelerated change. To achieve these goals, this paper explains some barriers and challenges that universities encounter, as well as technological resources and methodologies they have used in the current scenario to transform higher education to face Covid-19 disruption. The discussion and conclusion synthesize significant insights that can be applied to the digitalization of education in the foreseeable future.
The World Health Organization has declared Covid-19 as a pandemic that has posed a contemporary threat to humanity. This pandemic has successfully forced global shutdown of several activities, including educational activities, and this has resulted in tremendous crisis-response migration of universities with online learning serving as the educational platform. The crisis-response migration methods of universities, faculty and students, challenges and opportunities were discussed and it is evident that online learning is different from emergency remote teaching, online learning will be more sustainable while instructional activities will become more hybrid provided the challenges experienced during this pandemic are well explored and transformed to opportunities.
This study assesses learner perceptions of a blended e-learning system (BELS) and the feasibility of accommodating educational hypermedia systems (EHSs) according to learning styles using a modified version of the technology acceptance model (TAM). Recently, Moodle has been adopted by an Iraqi university alongside face-to-face (F2F) classrooms to provide flexible learning and improve understanding. Based on TAM, individual differences and perceptions were explored in relationships between learner satisfaction and technology adoption. The model was extended to include e-learning self-efficacy, perceived satisfaction, and learning styles. Although other variables can be integrated, the proposed framework is to investigate the effect of learning styles in predicting satisfaction and BELS acceptance. A total of 210 undergraduate students voluntarily took part in the research. Data was gathered using a survey instrument and the Index of Learning Styles (ILS) Questionnaire. Partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) technique was used to examine the path associated between dependent and independent constructs. Unlike prior TAM literature, this research highlights the integration of perceived satisfaction and technology acceptance in accordance with psychological traits and learner beliefs. Overall, the model achieved an acceptable fit and successfully integrated intention to use (ITU) and perceived satisfaction (PS). However, psychological differences did not indicate positive impacts on learner satisfaction and e-learning adoption.
The case study approach allows in-depth, multi-faceted explorations of complex issues in their real-life settings. The value of the case study approach is well recognised in the fields of business, law and policy, but somewhat less so in health services research. Based on our experiences of conducting several health-related case studies, we reflect on the different types of case study design, the specific research questions this approach can help answer, the data sources that tend to be used, and the particular advantages and disadvantages of employing this methodological approach. The paper concludes with key pointers to aid those designing and appraising proposals for conducting case study research, and a checklist to help readers assess the quality of case study reports.
p>This study assesses learner perceptions of a blended e-learning system (BELS) and the feasibility of accommodating educational hypermedia systems (EHSs) according to learning styles using a modified version of the technology acceptance model (TAM). Recently, Moodle has been adopted by an Iraqi university alongside face-to-face (F2F) classrooms to provide flexible learning and improve understanding. Based on TAM, individual differences and perceptions were explored in relationships between learner satisfaction and technology adoption. The model was extended to include e-learning self-efficacy, perceived satisfaction, and learning styles. Although other variables can be integrated, the proposed framework is to investigate the effect of learning styles in predicting satisfaction and BELS acceptance. A total of 210 undergraduate students voluntarily took part in the research. Data was gathered using a survey instrument and the Index of Learning Styles (ILS) Questionnaire. Partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) technique was used to examine the path associated between dependent and independent constructs. Unlike prior TAM literature, this research highlights the integration of perceived satisfaction and technology acceptance in accordance with psychological traits and learner beliefs. Overall, the model achieved an acceptable fit and successfully integrated intention to use (ITU) and perceived satisfaction (PS). However, psychological differences did not indicate positive impacts on learner satisfaction and e-learning adoption. </p
The purpose of this study was twofold: first, to explore the relationship between students' learning styles and their online participation in a blended learning course, and second, to investigate the relationships of students' online participation with their learning achievement and with course satisfaction. A total of 78 undergraduate students from a general education course called Digital Citizenship took part in the study. All the participants were required to participate in four different types of online activity: information access, interactive learning, networked learning and materials development. The study used the method of partial least squares to explore the relationships between different constructs. The results indicate that students' learning styles were significantly related to online participation and that online participation in networked learning and materials development was significantly related to their learning achievement and course satisfaction. This study highlights not only the crucial role of learning styles in online participation but also the importance of individual constructivism and social interaction for effective online learning.
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