Date

4-26-2024

Department

School of Education

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy in Education (PhD)

Chair

Sara Geary

Keywords

social integration, sense of community, information technology, online, international

Disciplines

Education

Abstract

The purpose of this quantitative, causal-comparative study is to investigate a student’s sense of community within a globally-available, online, asynchronous, Information Technology (IT) course and explore whether there is a difference in the sense of community scores if the student is currently residing in the United States or is currently residing outside of the United States. A sample size of N = 297 students was drawn from a convenience sample of online students who had self-enrolled in IT classes as part of an IT degree program. The Rovai’s Classroom Community Scale was used to calculate the sense of classroom community for two independent groups. Initially, a Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was used for analysis; however, a Mann-Whitney U test was ultimately applied because of failed assumptions. The final results found that the shapes of the three dependent variables were significantly different across the two measured groups, therefore mean rank scores were measured rather than the medians. It was found that the null hypothesis should be rejected for both the Connectedness variable and the Total_CCS_Score variable, while the null hypothesis should be retained for the Learning variable. The research shows that the experience for online IT students is significantly different for students based in the United States and those based outside of the United States. Future studies should consider exploring how to provide or ensure access to the necessary technology and also instructional design elements that might make experiences more alike among the two groups.

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