دانلود رایگان مقاله تراز چند بعدی بین آموزش آنلاین و دوره فناوری

Abstract

Compared with face-to-face instruction, online instruction in distance and hybrid education relies on the extensive use of course technology. Course technology supports multiple aspects of online instruction including objective specification, material organization, engagement facilitation, and outcome assessment. This study looks into different dimensions underlying the alignment between online instruction and course technology, and investigates the direct and indirect effects of involved constructs on student satisfaction as the outcome variable. The empirical evidence from a survey supports most research hypotheses, and suggests that instruction-technology fit is a partial mediator for online instruction and a full mediator for course technology in terms of their relationships with student satisfaction. Whereas all alignment dimensions but assessment fit are significant, engagement fit calls for closer attention than objective fit and material fit. That is, course technology has great potentials as well as a big space for improvement to facilitate the student engagement aspect of online instruction. From a learner-centered perspective, the findings offer researchers and practitioners helpful insights on how to utilize all kinds of e-learning tools for student success.

6. Conclusion and implications

This study examines the multi-dimensional alignment between online instruction and course technology, and investigates its relationships with related constructs. The results of an empirical study support most of the hypothesized relationships and provide some interesting findings regarding the different mediating roles that instructor-technology fit plays for online instruction and course technology in terms of their effects on student satisfaction. Highlighting the importance of course technology to online instruction, the findings also suggest that there is more space for instructors to maneuver for some aspects of alignment (e.g. engagement facilitation) than for others (e.g. outcome assessment) in course development. One major limitation of this study is the lack of discipline representation in the sample. The online courses from which student participants were elicited were all in business and social science fields. It is possible that the online courses in other fields have unique characteristics, and the findings of this study may not be directly applicable to them. This limits the generalizability of specific findings, though the general findings regarding the relationships among online instruction, course technology, instruction-technology fit and student satisfaction may still hold. In future studies, observations can be collected from online courses in other fields to verify the findings and make cross-disciplinary comparisons. In addition to the survey design, experimental studies may provide further insights by manipulating the alignment between online instruction and course technology, such as using different e-learning tools for a certain type of learning activities. Nevertheless, this study has some important theoretical and practical implications. First of all, it extends the concept of task-technology fit (TTF) to the context of online education. Due to the leaner-centered emphasis in educational context, it is not very helpful to directly borrow the existing TTF model to the evaluation of online courses. Compared with the original fitas-matching conceptualization, this study follows the fit-as-gestalt and fit-as-mediation approaches to develop the instruction-technology fit construct and hypothesize its relationships with other constructs.