Abstract:

Online education has expanded and is expected to continue growing rapidly in time along with technological innovations. It is obvious that there is a movement toward online learning which necessitates the need of more empirical evidence on effective learning and learners’ achievement. This study investigated effect of the variables: demographics (age, gender, being employed/unemployed, and computer efficacy); Internet self-efficacy; satisfaction (student-student, student-instructor, student-content interaction); and the reasons for online education preferences of students’ on their achievement. Differing from previous studies the current study particularly investigates the effect of students’ reasons for their preferences of distance education on their success besides all other variables. The results indicated that there is a positive correlation between students’ reasons for their preferences of distance education and their achievement scores which was measured by their final test scores. Besides, according to results of the regression analyses, preferences related to achievement was the only variable to affect regression equation in the online course regression analyses. That was accounted for about 5.1 % of the variance in students’ final grades.

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