Development of an instrument to assess student opinions of the quality of distance education courses

The purpose of this study was to develop a culturally sensitive instrument to assess the quality of distance education courses offered at a university in the southern United States through evaluation of student attitudes, opinions, and perceptions of distance education. Quality indicators, identified in a systematic literature review, coupled with an ecological framework served as the theoretical foundation for the instrument development process. The process of test development, outlined in the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (1999), was used and combined with Dillman’s (2000) four stages of pretesting to construct the instrument. Results indicated that the model constructed from the quality indicators and ecological framework provided valid and reliable measures of student attitudes, opinions, and perceptions of quality of the distance education courses