The online university: the students' perspective

Online learning has great potential to provide students with meaningful learning (Anderson, 1996), however online learning like any other form of structured learning requires careful design, management and facilitation. The world of virtual education with its variety of learning environments built on the basis of students remote from any physical classroom, promotes a need to establish systems to properly monitor what happens inside these environments so that effective educational strategies can be developed (Benigno & Trentin, 2000). Online learning at tertiary institutions is designed, developed and reviewed by faculty and there is very little literature that reflects the students’ perspective. This paper highlights some of the information gleaned from a study into the students’ perspective of online learning, conducted by an online student in the course of his studies, and builds upon a paper on the pilot study, presented previously and titled ‘Student Perceptions of Online Education’ (Hatch, 2001).