Student Experience with Course Design

To measure student satisfaction in online courses, the instructional designers on the Course Production Team created the Student Experience with Course Design Survey. The purpose of the survey was to gather information on students' experience with the design of online courses developed during UNC Charlotte’s online course design and development process. 

The survey contained 45 questions in total covering the topics of participant demographics, course characteristics, learner satisfaction, and eight categories consistent with a high quality online course design. These categories included course overview, learning objectives, assessment, learning materials, learning activities & learner interaction, course technology, learner support, and accessibility/usability. 

Response choices were provided on a Likert scale with a range from strongly disagree to strongly agree. 

The survey was built in Qualtrics and presented by the subject matter experts in an announcement to students halfway through the course. The survey was conducted in spring 2021, summer 2021, fall 2021, spring 2022, summer 2022, and fall 2022 over 43 courses with a total of 344 student participants.

Results and Discussion

Students felt positively about the course organization and course activity clarity in their online courses developed with the Course Production Team. For example, categories including the start here module, course activity clarity, and course organization had average responses equivalent to the level of agreement on the Likert scale. This indicates that our current course template is meeting the needs of students to access the materials they need to complete their assignments. 

Students responded with a feeling of neutrality towards their feelings of connectedness between themselves and fellow students. For example, instructor connectedness and student connectedness had large variance in responses along with averages equivalent to neither agree nor disagree. This indicates that our course template may not be building in enough student and instructor interactions during the design and development process. While student interaction items can be built during the course design process, these two categories are often only incorporated into a live course. 

Continuous Improvement 

As described, the Student Experience with Course Design Survey focused mostly on student satisfaction with the general outline of the course and the alignment between course objectives and assessments. 

From the data collected thus far, we found that students are generally satisfied with these areas. However, there is room for improvement in the areas of student and instructor connectedness. Due to these factors, we have begun to shift in the areas to be assessed moving into spring 2023. With an overall team goal of increasing student enrollment along with student success, the survey beginning in spring 2023 will focus on examining the levels of student engagement, universal design of assessments and assignments, the creation of a course community, and the alignment between students’ future goals and the course.

We will continue to gather data around student satisfaction with media in courses. We have also started a project examining student utilization of other types of media in courses (e.g. lecture videos) to determine the role that these media are playing in student experience within online courses.