Faculty member develops new tool to assess student satisfaction with online courses

Dr. Heather Hatchett, Cincinnati State Department Chair for Social and Behavioral Sciences, presented her research on student preferences for their remote learning experiences, and the tool she developed to measure student satisfaction, at the 2023 Assessment Institute Conference held in Indianapolis in Fall 2023.

• The Assessment Institute, hosted by Indiana University/Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI), is the oldest and largest higher education event in the United States focused on assessment and improvement.
• The annual conference is designed to “introduce good practice and innovations in assessment that attendees can use in their own setting.” Participants from throughout the U.S. and other countries attended the 2023 event.

Dr. Hatchett’s presentation reviewed her work to validate the Remote Learning Best Practices Inventory (RLBP), a tool she began developing in 2020 when the pandemic forced almost all classes to use remote delivery format.

Dr. Hatchett said the RLBP survey facilitates quick, efficient review of student satisfaction with online courses, based on both the design of the course and the way it is taught.

“It’s one tool that instructors can use to gain information about their online courses, along with other measures of online course quality and teaching effectiveness,” Heather said.

To validate the usefulness of the inventory, Dr. Hatchett compared 500 student ratings of courses using the RLBP to other measures of academic success and course quality, such as students’ overall GPA, course final grade, course satisfaction ratings, and Quality Matters Rubric ratings.

The results supported use of the RLBP survey as a unique assessment of online course quality.

For more information about Dr. Hatchett’s research and the RLBP Inventory, you can contact her at heather.hatchett@cincinnatistate.edu.