Assessing Students Satisfaction from Electronic Learning Systems

Entering information age and emergence, growth and development of technologies such as internet have changed the foundations of education system and at the meantime e-learning seized the opportunity and emerged as a new paradigm as very promptly many institutions and educational centers interested to employ it. At the same time, recent researches show that the incentive to continue education will be paled in those students who have started their education by virtual learning system and express their dissatisfaction about this system. Therefore, in this study we are about to identify effective factors of satisfaction of virtual students and to present a comprehensive and integrated model to measure it. This study categorized these factors into six main dimensions including student, professor, educational courses, technology, designing, and environment and these elements were tested in two stages. The first stage involves determining model indices by managers, employees, and designers of virtual education systems and the second stage is related to testing the model and evaluation of student's satisfaction about these systems by surveying 226 master students of governmental universities in Tehran. The results of analyzed data have led to introduce fifteen effective factors on satisfaction of virtual students among them course flexibility, internet and technology quality, usefulness and ease of use, and supporting services of the university were more important. Findings of this study can be a proper guide for managers and administrators of virtual education institutes to improve quality of their educational services.