A Study on the Instructor Role in Dealing with Mixed Contents: How It Affects Learner Satisfaction and Retention in e-Learning

The information and communication technology has become an indispensable part of modern education. The paradigm shift in the educational environment makes the instructors recollect the traditional roles in classroom education and adjust their responsibilities to accommodate a transformed pedagogy and learner expectations. This paper aims at the instructor's role in on-line education and studies how the instructor affects the learner satisfaction via the instructor involvement. Modifying the information system success model, the learning-environment qualities are rearranged into two-tiered formats-rigid and flexible contents-depending on the instructor's manageability. A partial least square analysis was used to examine the structural relationship among rigid and flexible contents qualities (i.e., technology-assisted learning-environment qualities), learner satisfaction, and learner retention, and found that the instructor involvement had a moderating effect on flexible contents qualities (test and activity); further, the moderating effect of instructor is captured as high involvement in tests and low involvement in activities. Consequently, this paper confirms the relationship between learning-environment qualities, learner satisfaction, and instructor involvement. Empirically, the instructor role in on-line education and the degree of instructor involvement in higher education are substantiated; the result of this study will also contribute to e-learning design or content delivery system development in a practical way.