Poster:

"Past research makes frequent note of educator and faculty resistance or concerns regarding online education platforms. However, because of the pandemic, both educators who champion new learning technologies and those with concerns about the efficacy and value of online learning were suddenly teaching remotely. This provided an opportunity to ask if students' perceptions of educator attitudes toward digital learning environments influence the student’s acceptance of these platforms. This question was addressed via a quantitative correlational survey design to measure the strength of association between educator attitude and student acceptance as a mean across the scale measuring confidence in the platform effectiveness as implemented in two specific instances - their best and worst mandatory online-course experiences. This score was used to compare to the Test of e-Learning Related Attitudes (TeLRA) scale to measure teacher attitudes towards e-learning. The Pearson’s correlation coefficients were computed for the analysis of a total of 205-course evaluations. Considering all evaluations there was a strong positive correlation in the relationship between student acceptance and perceived educator attitude. There were no statistically significant correlations between acceptance, previous online course experience, or age. This suggests that students who report a positive perception of the educator's attitude will also report more positive acceptance levels relating to software platform choices and course design."

Melissa Almeida, Graduate Student, UC Merced