LEARNER SATISFACTION IN BLENDED LEARNING: A CASE STUDY AT THE OPEN UNIVERSITY OF SRI LANKA

Higher education undergoes fundamental changes as a result of increasing globalization, advances in technology, and changing demography of students. In response to these changes, distance mode learning in higher education is growing rapidly. Therefore, the increased demand for educational opportunities and the need to find cost-effective solutions to meet this demand have become top priority in many developing countries in the world. In Sri Lanka, as same as other developing countries new policies were drawn in 1970s to accommodate this demand and has been pioneer institution to start blended and online mode courses since 2004 hoping increased educational opportunities for the nation. The problem affected was that no evaluation was done to identify most critical factors and to measure level of importance and satisfaction on available resources and support services. The objective of this study is to specify the success factors (SFs) of distance learning at OUSL distance education system and to measure the level of importance-satisfaction on existing support services. Case study method was used to continue the study and survey method was used to collect data from 163 distance learners who follow the Bachelor of Arts in Social Sciences (BASS) programme at the OUSL. The main research tool was a questionnaire. The study employs a four dimensions and students were asked to mark the level of importance and satisfaction under the five point Likert scale ranging from 'to a great extent' to 'not at all'. Collected data was analyzed using SPSS package and I-S ranked analysis were also done to find out importance and satisfaction level associated with each attribute. The study identified that distance learners think all SFs are important to them. They are satisfied with SFs related to learning resources and assessment while they are in moderate level satisfaction on support services and learning environment.