نحوه ساخت یک محصول یادگیری الکترونیکی: عواملی برای رضایت دانشجویان/مشتریان

The increasing use of web technologies has changed the way business is done, including in the field of education. In the last decade, the development of electronic learning (e-learning) systems became crucial to meet students’ demand. In this study, we adopt a relationship marketing perspective and apply the Kano Model to propose a way to build a non-academic e-learning course that can achieve student satisfaction. We measure the relevance of e-learning requirements from university students’ perspective to identify their expectations about e-learning courses and obtain relevant characteristics that can help to plan an e-learning product capable of achieving high customer satisfaction. Our study is based on interviews of 239 students from the Faculty of Economics at the University of Palermo. Through surveys, we measure users’ satisfaction of e-learning courses and classify quality attribute expectations into Kano Model categories. The indexes we create reveal key elements that can increase or decrease customers’ perceived satisfaction of e-learning courses. This study has specific value for academics who work on new product development in the field of customer satisfaction. Highlighting the correlation between the classification of expectations and satisfaction level, we find practical implications for educational institutions and/or other companies interested in developing and selling e-learning courses based on students’ needs using a customer-oriented approach.

Through this empirical research, we distilled some relevant hints that can be useful for developing e-learning courses targeting university students. We found that a user-friendly platform is a must-be requirement that needs to be a part of the service provided to avoid dissatisfying customers. We also found that the presence of a personal tutor and the release of a certificate of attendance as a result of completing the course are not important for customer satisfaction, while flexibility of time and hours, mandatory quizzes and exercises, and the presence of a download area are important elements to increase the perceived value of e-learning courses (i.e., attractive requirements). We are aware of the limits of our research. First, while the proffered findings may be useful in ‘selling’ e-learning services, what is useful for selling products is not necessarily what is useful for learning. This is a general limit of customer satisfaction measurement that is worth a few words (even though it is not strictly related to the aim of this research). According to our personal and limited experience (based on the basic evaluations made in our faculty), students find the best teachers to be those who have two characteristics that are not explicitly included in the questionnaires: 1. They are not boring. The teachers that take a more relaxed approach in class tend to get better evaluations from students. In this case, student satisfaction and quality of learning may coincide, as this can be an enhancing characteristic for learning. 2. They give higher marks on final exams. This finding partially emerged from our results, from which we found that 41 students consider mandatory quizzes and exercises as a reverse requirement. We think the final exam is an important aspect of learning and not just a way for teachers to get retribution. It is through the final exam that students can become more aware of the limits of and/or satisfaction with what they learned. Unfortunately, many students are satisfied by a higher mark, even if this does not represent their true learning achievements. This warns us that we need to put everything in the right place: quality of learning is not linearly linked to student/customer satisfaction. The aim of this study was to provide useful hints toward designing an e-learning service for students who want to learn more from home, in front of the computer, in a time-saving manner. It is not intended to suggest elements for designing university classes, for which an assessment of customer satisfaction characteristics should not be the main issue considered. Another limit of this study is that we considered an ideal e-learning service ex-ante. Our goal was not to measure actual customer satisfaction of an existing e-learning course designed according to the characteristics we indicated. However, we may attempt this in future research if an e-learning provider designs an e-learning course according to our findings. The third limitation is that the sample we interviewed is restricted in terms of place and number. However, we think our results can be useful in other contexts and countries as the social and income characteristics of our Sicilian university students are comparable to those of students from other Mediterranean countries with similar levels of educational development (e.g., Spain, Portugal, Greece). We plan to conduct further research to repeat this analysis at other universities in other countries to uncover differences and similarities in students’ customer satisfaction requirements for e-learning.