Success factors in distance education

RESEARCH FINDINGS 

 

Students indicated their frequency of use of the course’s various features on a five-point Likert scale.  

Responses ranged from 1=“not at all” to 5=“very frequent” (see Figure 1). The least frequently used 

feature of the course was the use of videotapes. This may have been because students were able to 

attend face-to-face lectures and/or view the lectures on the web. Students rated the readings and the 

virtual library as having medium usage. Rated as frequently used were: the summaries, slides, quizzes 

and the bulletin board. Of these four, the quizzes rated the highest, and were also the most interactive, 

since the quiz was graded immediately.  

The relationship between these mechanisms for promoting teaching effectiveness and the technology 

used, proved to be significant; the Pearson correlation (two-tailed) correlation coefficient was 0.563 with a 

p value of 0.001.  

A factor analysis extracted underlying technology factor clusters with a principal component analysis;   

the factor matrix was rotated using the varimax method. Three factors emerged from the factor analysis. 

Each factor displays a high level of reliability with Cronbach alpha > 0.7. Overall, the three factors explain 

70 per cent of the variance. The results of the factor analysis are summarized in Table 1.