An Investigation of Factors that Contribute to Student Satisfaction from Online Courses: The Example of an Online Accounting Course

Although most courses are offered in the traditional synchronous way where the teaching and learning mainly takes place in the classroom, the internet has proven to be an effective tool in learning. The demand of online courses is constantly growing, however there is paucity of research of online delivery success factors, especially of accounting courses. The aim of this paper was to investigate the factors that contribute to student satisfaction from online teaching and learning of an accounting course. This study was conducted at a university in the USA amongst 80 students enrolled in an online accounting course over a period of two semesters. The quantitative data are based on the students´ course evaluation forms of the instructor´s teaching and overall satisfaction with the course. The findings suggest that the students found the asynchronous online teaching and learning interesting and challenging. The factors that mainly contribute to student satisfaction include the instructor´s preparation for the course and her availability to students, the clear grading criteria, the assignment which they found useful and the other resources that were available online. They value the least the development of writing skills. Additionally, this study proposes that there is positive significant correlation between the instructor´s overall performance with the overall student satisfaction from the course. The instructors performance, availability and easy to use technology enhance the learning and teaching from online pedagogies.