STUDENT SATISFACTION IN THE CONTEXT OF A POSTGRADUATE PROGRAMME OF THE HELLENIC OPEN UNIVERSITY

• Published in: The Turkish online journal of distance education TOJDE Vol. 16; no. 2; pp. 40 - 55
• Main Authors: ANAGNOSTOPOULOU, Elina, MAVROIDIS, Ilias, GIOSSOS, Yiannis, KOUTSOUBA, Maria
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Anadolu Üniversitesi 03.04.2015; Anadolu University
• Subjects: Age Differences; Attendance; Blended distance education, student satisfaction, tutor performance, communication, interaction, course evaluation; Blended Learning; Correlation; Course Evaluation; Distance Education; Foreign Countries; Graduate Students; Greece; Group Counseling; Kruskal Wallis Test; Mann Whitney U Test; Open Universities; Questionnaires; Student Evaluation of Teacher Performance; Student Satisfaction; Teacher Student Relationship; Greece
• ISSN: 1302-6488; 1302-6488
• DOI: 10.17718/tojde.52944

The aim of this study is to empirically examine the correlation between studentsatisfaction from their studies and three important distance learning factors in a blendeddistance education environment, namely the student-tutor interaction, the performanceof the tutor and the course evaluation by the students. The study involved 81postgraduate students from a modular course of the School of Humanities of the HellenicOpen University (HOU). A questionnaire of 35 closed type questions was used. Themajority of the students were satisfied from their studies, from the tutor’s performanceand from the communication and interaction with their tutor, while they also provided apositive overall course evaluation. Regarding the course evaluation, they would like thecourse programme to be better formulated and more clearly communicated. The dataanalysis yielded a significant, positive correlation between the satisfaction of the studentsfrom their studies and all three examined factors. Finally, there was a statisticallysignificant difference on student satisfaction levels among different age groups, astatistically significant difference regarding the number of course modules attended inrelation to the evaluation of the tutor's performance and a statistically significantdifference regarding the number of Counseling Group Sessions (CGS) attended in relationto student satisfaction.