The effects of instructor control of online learning environments on satisfaction and perceived learning

Instructional design is important as it helps set the discourse, context, and content of learning in an online environment. Specific instructional design decisions do not only play a part in the discourse of the learners, but they can affect the learners’ levels of satisfaction and perceived learning as well. Numerous studies have shown the value that both student satisfaction and learning have on learner achievement. For this reason, the question of whether instructors can impact satisfaction and perceived learning through various instructional design decisions is important. This study looked at broad-based instructor decisions to see if online environments with higher levels of instructor control lead to higher levels of student satisfaction and/or perceived learning. Three different online environments were used, with each one containing progressively more instructor control. The results show that there were no significant differences in regards to mean levels of satisfaction between the three environments. However, there were significant differences among mean levels of perceived learning based on the differing instructor-controlled environments. This study shows that increasing the levels of instructor control within online environments leads to an increase in perceived learning.