Amanda Hooser
For instructors to be successful in using LMS, they must feel satisfied with the features of the system. Without this satisfaction, the instructors are less likely to deliver high quality education and instruction. Consequently, for students to be successful in online courses, they have to be offered high quality education and instruction from satisfied instructors. In my experience as an OSU student, teacher satisfaction drives LMS however, this correlation isn’t always present. I have taken over 50 credits of online courses during my four years here, and I have found instructors to be inconsistent with their quality of education and instruction. Why is this? I think that the instructors do not see the benefit of the system to be great enough to put in the work to develop new teaching programs. In order for them to see this, we have to understand how they determine benefit.
In a study conducted by Ibrahim Almarashdeh at the University of Dammam in Saudi Arabia, the factors that most greatly contribute to instructor satisfaction were investigated. It investigated how system quality (SyQ), service quality (SvQ), information quality (InQ), perceived ease of use (PEU), and perceived usefulness (PU) contributed to user satisfaction (SAT). Furthermore, the questionnaire evaluated how SAT contributed to the net benefit (NB). SAT was defined as the evaluation of the user’s experience and NB as the balance of negative and positive impacts on user behavior..
The results closely concentrated which indicated that the instructors shared a similar point of view on the questionnaire topics. This is important because it shows that demonstrating the benefits to instructors as a whole will be effective because they will interpret benefit in similar ways. In addition, the results suggested that the strongest relationship was exhibited between perceived usefulness and user satisfaction. I think this finding would be consistent with the views of instructors at OSU because converting to Canvas already increased SyQ, SvQ, InQ and PEU. Therefore, the only contributing factors to instructor satisfaction that need attention are PU and SAT.
For students to succeed in online courses, instructors have to all be on the same page. It is our job as students to continue to reinforce the usefulness of instructor consistency in quality education and instruction through teacher evaluations and blog posts to hopefully increase their satisfaction with Canvas.
