Measuring teachers and learners’ perceptions of the quality of their online learning experience

Abstract

This article explores the quality of the online learning experience based on the Sloan-C framework and the Online Learning Consortium’s (OLC) quality scorecard. The OLC index has been implemented to evaluate quality in online programs from different perspectives. Despite this, the opinions of learners are ignored, and it is built using feedback from experts and panelists while ignoring the factors that teachers consider important during their lectures. We propose an alternative way of measuring the quality of online learning programs by analyzing the satisfaction of the learning experience and using teachers and students’ perceptions. The 11 categories composing the index were weighted in the teacher and student indices using principal component analysis, and finally these two indices were linearly combined with a parameter that defines the importance of each body. Findings show that while teachers perceive collaborative learning variables as crucial, learners are more concerned with their own learning benefits.