Building Trust in E-Learning

• Main Author: Y. Diana Wang (Author)
• Format: Book
• Published: Athens Institute for Education and Research, 2014-02-01T00:00:00Z.
• Subjects: article
• Online Access: Connect to this object online.

Summary

As Web-based course delivery continues to emerge and thrive as a legitimate alternative to classroom instruction, educational institutions and online instructors face the challenge of building and sustaining student trust in e-learning. The present study represents an attempt to address the challenge by identifying the social and technical factors that can likely induce or influence students' perception about the trustworthiness of an e-learning course and integrating the factors into a socio-technical framework that can be empirically validated. The methodology used and the data obtained from a university-wide survey conducted in an American university are reported in this paper. The results indicate that two underlying dimensions, Course Instruction and Privacy and Security, exist among the 12 trust-inducing factors. Although all 12 factors were found to contribute to the respondents' perception of the trustworthiness of an e-learning course, the Course Instruction dimension was rated about 10% higher than the Privacy and Security dimension. This suggests that the social and course design factors (e.g., reputation, design quality, instructor socio-communicative style), when used effectively, can help overcome students' privacy and security concerns for an e-learning course. The study makes at least two important contributions to the field by proposing a framework of 12 trust-inducing factors for e-learning and by extending the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA

Item Description

https://doi.org/10.30958/aje.1-1-1
2241-7958