Distance Learning and Student Satisfaction in Java Programming Courses

Student satisfaction with distance learning is impacted by a variety of factors, including interaction with the instructor and the structure of the course. Satisfaction with distance-learning courses also has a strong impact on retention. In an earlier article, we determined that student satisfaction as measured by course evaluation scores in an online discrete mathematics course taught by the first author was not statistically significantly different from that of students in traditional versions of the same course, supporting some previous studies on distance-learning student satisfaction. However, the model of distance-learning studied in our initial work is not the dominant model used for distance learning at the institution in question. In this article we obtain statistically significant results different from the earlier article when a distance-learning course that uses the dominant model is considered. In particular, the course evaluations for online and traditional sections of introductory Java programming courses varied in some notable ways.