| Online learning has become a popular alternative to traditional schools, allowing flexible schedules and availability of accelerated programs. In spite of the positive attributes, online education faces some challenges, such as assessing student engagement, seen as an indicator of academic excellence. The literature reveals that existing instruments that measure student engagement include constructs other than engagement and are not designed to measure students' engagement in online education. The purpose of this study was to develop an instrument to measure adult student engagement in online courses. The survey consisted of 47 items measuring goal orientation, self-regulation, time management, information retrieval, communication and technology administered to a convenience sample of university students from the online division at a south Florida university. Cronbach's alpha was conducted to test for internal consistency of each subscale (Tavakol & Dennick, 2011). Principal component analysis (PCA) was the technique used for factor reduction (Schmitt, 2011). The number of factors to retain was determined using the Kaiser-Guttman criterion with eigenvalues greater than 1 (Henson & Roberts, 2006). This study contributes to the body of literature specifically aimed at online learning adult population and addresses the gap in the literature related to adult students' engagement in an online school setting. |
