Undergraduate Student Perceptions and Satisfaction toward Online Psychology Courses at an HBCU

Online education has increasingly become an alternative to face-to-face instruction and changing the academic landscape across the nations. A 2005 survey of 2,200 U.S. colleges and universities disclosed nearly 3.2 million students taking at least one online course (Allen & Seaman, 2006) and this number has increased to 6.7 million in 2012 (Allen & Seaman, 2013). In fact, 69.1 percent of chief academic leaders said that online learning was a critical component of their institutions’ long-term strategy (Allen & Seaman, 2013) perhaps to compensate the declining enrollment trends in higher education institutions or to handle the growing student demand for “anywhere, anytime” learning through online classes or both. However, the questions remain to be answered are: How do students feel about online courses? Why do they opt for online courses? What challenges do they face when taking courses online? Therefore, this paper examines the pedagogy of psychology online instruction in terms of students’ perceptions and satisfaction levels among those in 4 fully online Psychology courses in the Fall semester of 2016 at an HBCU in Middle Georgia. Data gathered from students disclosed that majority of students were “very satisfied” with all the course-related elements except for peer networking and support (47%). Every student reportedly satisfied with the current level of incorporating multimedia. Certain student concerns like those outside the program jurisdiction (e.g., financial aid) are too complex and are beyond the scope of this study.