Not Now, Maybe Later, and Often Not at All: Situational, Institutional, Dispositional, Epistemological, and Technological Barriers to Business-Based Online Training Courses

The purpose of the research was to determine whether the situational, institutional, dispositional, epistemological, and technological barriers that affect attrition in distance education apply to the business-based distance training arena. Although reports about distance training students indicate that attrition from distance training is a significant issue, the results from this study find that 90 percent of the business professionals who answered this survey that have taken business-based e-learning courses are not discontinuing their e-learning courses. This finding contradicts many published articles. The free-form comments written by the online learners who answered this survey provided some hints as to what may be keeping these business professionals from abandoning their e-learning courses. The respondents to this study acknowledge that interaction with other learners and with course facilitators, chunking of courses and curricula into appropriate sized pieces, technical support, good course design, and incentives to reach course or curriculum completion have kept them online.

Author dc:creator

• Roberts, Linda Enders

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Darryl McGraw, Committee Member
• David Rieder, Committee Member
• Brad Mehlenbacher, Committee Member
• Paula Berardinelli, Committee Chair

• distance education
• e-learning
• training
• attrition

Statement dc:rights

• I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to NC State University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report.

Dc Identifier Other

etd-04132004-073125

OAI record oai:identifier

https://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/server/oai/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=dim&identifier=oai%3Arepository.lib.ncsu.edu%3A1840.16%2F4151