To Have or Have Not: An Examination of Feedback, Learner Control and Knowledge Type in Online Learning

Online course offerings have not only gained in popularity among technology-mediated training methods, but they also have produced a prominent change in the landscape of academia. It is therefore imperative to obtain a solid understanding of the important elements that contribute to effective online learning. The major contribution of this paper is to investigate a complex set of interrelated factors in the relatively new sphere of online learning. The intercombination of these particular factors appears to be important from past research, but it has never been explicitly addressed, and never in an experimental setting. Findings of this study have shown that feedback and learner control have a significant interaction effect for declarative knowledge acquisition. For satisfaction, however, feedback is only salient for declarative knowledge learning, and not for procedural knowledge learning. Other factors, such as interest and comfort level produce effects in most situations.