Assessment of the factors influencing students’ satisfaction with online learning during Covid-19 Pandemic at Makerere University

Abstract

The objective of this study was to assess the factors influencing students’ satisfaction with online learning during covid-19 period at Makerere University. Therefore, it aims to find out whether gender, place of residence, financial condition of student’s family, connectivity issues, adequacy of training students in using online platforms, year of study, and attitude towards online learning platforms have a significant relationship on students’ satisfaction with online learning. It used primary data and was collected using an e-mail questionnaire on a sample of 209 respondents from different courses at School of Statistics and Planning. The analysis was done using frequency distribution, Pearson chi-square, and logistic regression. In the results, majority of students were dissatisfied with online learning during COVID-19 pandemic (84.06%). Slightly over a half of the respondents were from urban places of residence (58.1%) of the total respondents sampled and slightly over a half of the respondents were male (57.42%). In the bi-variate level analysis, it was found out that the significant factors that influence students’ satisfaction were; parental support, knowledge about the approaches, training on how to use different approaches, effectiveness of the training, university preparedness for online learning, internet connectivity and online learning cost, whose p-values were less than 0.1(P<0.1). In the multivariate analysis, students who reported that the university was not well prepared to continue studies online were four times more likely to be dissatisfied than those who reported that the university was prepared enough to conduct online learning(OR=4.88). Those who reported that the training was not effective were three times more likely to be dissatisfied than those who suggested that the training provided by the university was effective (OR=3.73). The findings indicate the need to; (i) avail effective training to students (ii) formulate policies that will enable the university to adopt and prepare adequately before starting the semester using online learning .