In the past decade, there has been an enormous growth of distance education
courses and programs in higher education. However, the potential of distance education
is tempered by one overriding question: How do you ensure that distance education
coursework and degrees are of high quality? The purpose of this study is threefold: (1)
to identify quality indicators of distance education; (2) to provide implications of the
identified quality indicators for health education researchers and practitioners; and, (3) to
develop an instrument to assess student opinions of the quality of distance education.
Dillman's (2000) steps of pretesting and the instrument development framework in the
Standards (1999) were used, and data were collected from students enrolled in four
health education on-line courses during the Spring 2006 semester at Texas A&M
University. MPlus (Muthen & Muthen, 2002) was used to conduct reliability and
validity analyses of the instrument. The results of the study revealed common
benchmarks and quality indicators that all parties deem important in designing,
implementing and evaluating distance education courses and programs. Additionally, an
instrument was produced that resulted in both valid and reliable scores.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-1023 |
| Date | 15 May 2009 |
| Creators | Chaney, Elizabeth Hensleigh |
| Contributors | Eddy, James M. |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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