Internet Learning Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2014 | Page 41

Internet Learning quality from a student’s persepctive. Tier I contains the items that students strongly agreed with, which indicates the course met Standards 3.3 (Item 7), 3.2 (Item 15), 3.2 (Item 15) to a great extent. Tier II contains the items that students agreed with, thereby indicating that the course met these standards to a moderate extent. Tier III contains items that students agreed with to some extent, thus indicating that the course did not meet Standards 7.2 (Item 24) and 8.1 (Item 25). Course C Twenty out of the 22 students completed the course design evaluation survey with a response rate of 90.91%. The person reliability was 0.96 and the item reliability was 0.78. The item statistics indicate that Item 10 (MNSQ = 2.83) will be dropped and Item 12 (MNSQ = 2.64) and Item 6 (MNSQ = 2.60) will need to be revised if the instrument is used in the future. The Item Map (Fig. 3) indicates that there are three tiers regarding course quality from a student’s persepctive. Tier I contains the item that students strongly agreed with, indicating the course met Standard 2.2 (Item 5) to a great extent. Tier II contains the items that students agreed with, thus showing that the course met these standards to a moderate extent. Tier III contains the item that students agreed to some extent, demonstrating that the course did not meet Standard (Item 10), a non-essential standard. To satisfy the third objective of this project the data were treated as follows: used as at or above 85% level and coded as “1”. Student responses of to a moderate extent “3”, to some extent “2” and to little or no extent “1” were used as below 85% level and coded as “0”. According to the majority rule principle if 2/3 of the students selects to a great extent “4” or to a very great extent “5” for an item in the survey then it was determined that the course met that particular standard from a student’s perspective. See Tables 1, 2, and 3. • Three QM certified peer reviewers reviewed the three courses according to QM standards and recorded their scores in a spreadsheet. If a standard was met, “1” was recorded for the standard. If a standard was not met, “0” was recorded for the standard. If two (2/3) of the peer reviewers assigned a score to a specific standard then the course met that standard from a peer reviewer’s perspective. See Tables 1, 2, and 3. The data were treated in a spreadsheet and analyzed with SPSS. A nonparametric Mann-Whitney U test (2 independent samples) was used to evaluate a difference in medians between the two groups (students and peer reviewers). The two groups were different and independent of each other even though peer reviewers are asked to take a student’s view when completing course reviews. • Students’ results were converted into a measure comparable to that of the reviewers’ rating. Student responses of to a great extent “4” or to a very great extent “5” were 40