Exploratory Research on Satisfaction Degree in Distance Education

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

1. The authors claim that "students’ satisfaction with distance education should be analyzed by various statistical methods" at line 34, but the later text lacks adequate such analyses.  What are the median, mode, and standard deviation?

2. Just to emphasize again. It is inappropriate to assume that people living in some cities/provinces have higher living standards. There is correlation, but not causation. 

3. One of the contributions the authors highlight is the study of teacher's satisfaction in remote teaching, but there is only a short paragraph covering the distribution of course formats provided. I would expect more analyses on that front while the current analysis is inappropriate. For example, the authors claim "live courses are accepted by more teachers", but were teachers forced to teach in live sessions or was the format "accepted" by teachers?  

4. Please proofread extensively. There are many grammar errors and improper usages of words. To name a few, it should be "freshmen" not "fresh" for table 4. Or "students could receive education out of the school by online platforms" in the introduction. I suppose you mean receiving education "off campus". 

Author Response

1. The authors claim that "students’ satisfaction with distance education should be analyzed by various statistical methods" at line 34, but the later text lacks adequate such analyses. What are the median, mode, and standard deviation?

Response 1: Thank you for your comments. Actually, this paper did not use statistical methods as they are too cumbersome, and hence we propose to analyze the data by comparing the distribution of the votes. We have mentioned this condition at the end of this sentence (line 36), “but use of these methods is too cumbersome” , which have also been highlighted by us with red color. Median represents the medium level of the data. Mode represents the general situation of the data. Standard deviation represents the degree of dispersion of the data. These are statistical methods, we could not focus on them.

2. Just to emphasize again. It is inappropriate to assume that people living in some cities/provinces have higher living standards. There is correlation, but not causation.

Response 2: Thank you for your comments. Considering the influence of living areas, we have revised subsection 5.2.1 with red fonts to ensure that the statement is more rigorous. Generally speaking, We make no assumptions about people's living standards, but just analyze that the economic level of one city/province may have an influence on students’ attitude toward distance education. Furthermore, We leave it as future work on whether personal living standards has an impact on the satisfaction degree, as it requires a more detailed research.

3. One of the contributions the authors highlight is the study of teacher's satisfaction in remote teaching, but there is only a short paragraph covering the distribution of course formats provided. I would expect more analyses on that front while the current analysis is inappropriate. For example, the authors claim "live courses are accepted by more teachers", but were teachers forced to teach in live sessions or was the format "accepted" by teachers?

Response 3: Thank you for your comments. We have added more analyses of teachers’ satisfaction in Section 5.4 with red fonts. Compared to other formats of remote teaching methods, live courses are more accepted by teachers. We have also made changes to the description of the contribution and added the survey of teacher-specific satisfaction to the future work (Section 6).

4. Please proofread extensively. There are many grammar errors and improper usages of words. To name a few, it should be "freshmen" not "fresh" for table 4. Or "students could receive education out of the school by online platforms" in the introduction. I suppose you mean receiving education "off campus".

Response 4: Thank you for your comments. We have checked the whole paper and improved the English expressions of it.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper subject is highly relevant, it gained more attention due to the pandemic. However, Distance Education (DE) is not a new subject and, as mentioned by other reviewers, there's a good knowledge available on the subject.

The number of participants presented by the researchers is good, definitely, but if one needs to be very consistent when talking about satisfaction/dissatisfaction considering DE, maybe the acceptable threshold of dissatisfaction should be less than 1%. Otherwise, research is risking to say good things about achieved results (Figure 1.b: 5% of dissatisfaction; Figure 1.d: 14.6%), which can be very questionable.

One thing really called my attention: the fact that the research methodology is essentially based on questionnaires, which to my understanding, can be a very fragile instrument to evaluate on-line learning. Four options of answer does not really allow to grab the very true about the process neither allow to make solid conclusions. Since research credibility lies 100% on the participant's will, bias cannot be avoided, which represent a major risk.

Maybe the results gathered from que questionnaires should be complemented with additional knowledge provided by other tools, authors may evaluate it.

Another sentence that raised an yellow flag to me was this one: "[10] showed that if online courses are designed with pedagogically sound practices, they can provide the same environment as face-to face courses and achieve similar satisfaction of students"

I'm also lecturer, engineering field, 15 years of experience dealign with both traditional and on-line classes, and both kinds definitely required a solid pedagogic ground. It is not a specific need of remote classes, it has always been the universal requirement for good classes at the Higher Education level. It shall be mandatory all over the world and not be highlighted as an advantage.

Still some problems with the language (e.g. "this paper believes"; no, the authors believe), which was already pointed out by other reviewer.

SR and ASR seem to be undefined (line 167). There's still a vague use of "etc." (also already pointed out by another reviewer); it shall simply be avoided since "etc." leaves to the reader the task to deduce what the writer wanted to say.

 

Author Response

1. The number of participants presented by the researchers is good, definitely, but if one needs to be very consistent when talking about satisfaction/dissatisfaction considering DE, maybe the acceptable threshold of dissatisfaction should be less than 1%. Otherwise, research is risking to say good things about achieved results (Figure 1.b: 5% of dissatisfaction; Figure 1.d: 14.6%), which can be very questionable.

Response 1: Thank you for your comments. We want to emphasize that one of the purposes of our research is to analyze the reasons for people’s satisfaction and dissatisfaction from multiple perspectives. Honestly, some dissatisfaction ratios are more than 1%, but the reasons behind this dissatisfaction are exactly what we want to know, and the dissatisfaction ratio also reflects the necessity of our research.

2. One thing really called my attention: the fact that the research methodology is essentially based on questionnaires, which to my understanding, can be a very fragile instrument to evaluate on-line learning. Four options of answer does not really allow to grab the very true about the process neither allow to make solid conclusions. Since research credibility lies 100% on the participant's will, bias cannot be avoided, which represent a major risk.

Response 2: Same to response 3.

3. Maybe the results gathered from que questionnaires should be complemented with additional knowledge provided by other tools, authors may evaluate it.

Response 3: Thank you for your comments. As we mentioned in the response 1, one of our main purposes is to analyze the reasons why students are dissatisfied with the distance education method. Questionnaire survey is one of the most direct and effective ways to reflect students' attitudes. All students are surveyed anonymously and the data is obtained through the official channels of university, which can guarantee the trustworthiness of data to a certain extent. Therefore, the research and analysis on the dissatisfied parts are more valuable. But thank you very much for your suggestion, the problem settings and the use of other tools are indeed necessary to be set more meticulous and to assist our investigation, and these are taken as one of the future works in Section 6 .

4. Another sentence that raised an yellow flag to me was this one: "[10] showed that if online courses are designed with pedagogically sound practices, they can provide the same environment as face-to face courses and achieve similar satisfaction of students"

Response 4: Same to response 5.

5. I'm also lecturer, engineering field, 15 years of experience dealign with both traditional and on-line classes, and both kinds definitely required a solid pedagogic ground. It is not a specific need of remote classes, it has always been the universal requirement for good classes at the Higher Education level. It shall be mandatory all over the world and not be highlighted as an advantage.

Response 5: Thank you for your comments. Firstly, this yellow-flag sentence is just the claim in [10], and we only paraphrased it here and listed it as the related work. In fact, we agree with you that both traditional and on-line classes definitely require a solid pedagogic ground, but the teaching format of online courses still needs a lot of research and improvement to achieve the similar effect as offline courses. This paper is aimed to analyze the reasons behind students' satisfaction or dissatisfaction with online courses from multiple dimensions, which can be used to further improve the distance education in the future. This purpose has also been marked in red on lines 41-42.

6. Still some problems with the language (e.g. "this paper believes"; no, the authors believe), which was already pointed out by other reviewer.

Response 6: Thank you for your comments. We have checked the paper and improved the English expressions of it.

7. SR and ASR seem to be undefined (line 167). There's still a vague use of "etc." (also already pointed out by another reviewer); it shall simply be avoided since "etc." leaves to the reader the task to deduce what the writer wanted to say.

Response 7: Thank you for your comments. We feel so sorry for this mistake and have corrected it. We have changed the use of “etc.” and added the subjective in the next sentence to avoid ambiguity.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The article presents interesting study about distance education during Covid-19 pandemic. The study presents the results of questionnaire research about aspects of mentioned education – teaching of teachers, communication with them, possibilities of study platforms. Statistical results are described, and they are also analyzed.

I recommend following changes:

1   1.  I don´t understand, why some parts of the text have blue color.

2   2.  I think, that on page 4 the abbreviations SR and ASR are wrong. Probably, it should be used SP and ASP. Please, control.  

3   3.  It will be good to add information, if the questionnaire in the Table 1 (page 5, row 193) is prepared by authors or they used some standardized questionnaire.

4   4.   I have another question to Table 1. Why some questions have 3 answers (A, B, C), the other group of questions have 4 answers (A, B, C, D). I think, that optimal answers are A, B, C, D, E in the question 5. This question is very similar to classical Likert scale (please see Cherry, Kendra. “Using Likert Scales in Psychology.” Verywell Mind, 14 June 2018. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-likert-scale-2795333). I recommend to use this scale in further research.

5. On the page 7 in the Figure 1 the first two cake graphs above have too small letters.

6. I recommend to give participants also open questions, because the questionnaire has strict given answers. Open answers is possible to use in some art of qualitative research. I recommend to use the method “Word Clouds“ (see for example http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11528-014-0750-9)

7.       Why the authors formulate the statement on the page 10, row 310 “The lack of learning atmosphere is the most important factor hindering students’ satisfaction in distance education, so we can improve students’ satisfaction by improving the learning atmosphere.“ Why this factor „lack of learning atmosphere“ is the most important and not another factor?

8.       In general, I recommend to use literature from studies already published about Covid 19 education, for example https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci12070458, https://doi.org/10.3390/books978-3-0365-2926-4)

 

Author Response

1  I don´t understand, why some parts of the text have blue color.

Response 1: Thanks for your question. Actually, we have submitted this paper to this journal before and blue fonts are the revision parts according to these reviewers’ comments. This time, the revised parts are marked by red fonts.

2  I think, that on page 4 the abbreviations SR and ASR are wrong. Probably, it should be used SP and ASP. Please, control. 

Response 2: Thanks for your correction. We have revised it.

3  It will be good to add information, if the questionnaire in the Table 1 (page 5, row 193) is prepared by authors or they used some standardized questionnaire.

Response 3: Thanks for your comments. In the future work (Section 6), we have proposed to set more detailed questions and use some other tools for further analysis.

4  I have another question to Table 1. Why some questions have 3 answers (A, B, C), the other group of questions have 4 answers (A, B, C, D). I think, that optimal answers are A, B, C, D, E in the question 5. This question is very similar to classical Likert scale (please see Cherry, Kendra. “Using Likert Scales in Psychology.” Verywell Mind, 14 June 2018. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-likert-scale-2795333). I recommend to use this scale in further research.

Response 4: Thanks for your comments. We have mentioned using Likert scale in the future work.

5. On the page 7 in the Figure 1 the first two cake graphs above have too small letters.

Response 5: Thanks for your comments. We have changed the pictures.

6. I recommend to give participants also open questions, because the questionnaire has strict given answers. Open answers is possible to use in some art of qualitative research. I recommend to use the method “Word Clouds“ (see for example http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11528-014-0750-9)

Response 6: Thanks for your comments. We have added it in the future work.

7. Why the authors formulate the statement on the page 10, row 310 “The lack of learning atmosphere is the most important factor hindering students’ satisfaction in distance education, so we can improve students’ satisfaction by improving the learning atmosphere.“ Why this factor „lack of learning atmosphere“ is the most important and not another factor?

Response 7: Thanks for your question. As shown in Figure 4, we set up a question for negative factors. The question asks students what is the biggest challenge for online distance education. Among the answers, there are 1051 people who choose the lack of learning atmosphere. Therefore, we thought that “lack of learning atmosphere“ is the most important factor.

8. In general, I recommend to use literature from studies already published about Covid 19 education, for example https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci12070458, https://doi.org/10.3390/books978-3-0365-2926-4)

Response 8: Thanks for your comments. We have added them in the future work.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors addressed most of my comments, in particular, the future work and teachers' acceptance of remote teaching. I really appreciate it!  One last minor suggestion: the future work and conclusion can be better worded and aligned. The newly added section might be a bit intrusive for readers without the context. 

Author Response

Thank you for your comment and suggestion very much. We put the section of “future work” after the “conclusion” and added some connecting sentences to make the context more coherent, using the green fonts.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

1. How did the authors collect the survey? Was the survey mandatory for the students? If so, it is likely that students just selected polarized answers (all satisfied or all not satisfied) to finish the survey. 
2. The metric is not scientifically sound. I would like to see more statistical analyses. Analyzing the mean values of the data collected can easily lead to false conclusions. What are the median, max, min, and standard deviation? Arts students have a low satisfaction ratio. Could this just be because the sample size is so small? 
3. I'm not familiar with China's geographics, but it seems the authors simply assume people from a certain region have a higher living standard. Is it so?

Reviewer 2 Report

The strength of this research is in the numbers. That said, the reporting of the research needs to be heavily revised, claims well thought out, limitations recognised and pointed out, and conflicting statement written out. Below are some examples:

• Consider the claim that research focusing on exploring the impact of one potential influencing factor "will be based on prejudice" (line 34). 
• Clarify "Since the distance education model is a first attempt during the pandemic outbreak" (p.39). For whom? In what context? Note that distance education (DE) has been around for more than half a century and research about DE abounds.
• The two consecutive statements on lines (49-51) read in conflict to each other.
• Paragraph starting line 94 is very confusing. It is very hard to follow what the authors mean to say. Besides, in the discussion of alternative theoretical models to help devise the most suited for the study of concern, it does not make sense to be shrugging anything with an "etc" (line 104).
• The claim that “Considering the distance learning can hardly integrate learning environment as face-to-face courses do” (lines 130-131) suggests that the authors need to update themselves on the vast body of research literature on distance learning these last 3 decades.
• The grounds on which the data collection instrument was designed needs to be clarified. Besides, there needs to be discussed the reliability and the validity of this data collection. How can one have confidence in the research findings generated through this study if there is not first shown convincing evidence of the instrument used to generate these findings?
• Although the strength is in the impressive number of research participants, the results need to be considered with caution. What these results show are trends.
• It is recommended that figure 2(a) is revised that “positive” sections of the pie chart are brought in adjacent order. Figure 3 is not referenced in the text. The individual visualisations within each figure need to be numbered.

Please note that the above is not an exclusive list.

The reference list contains numerous referencing errors.

The written English expression is very poor, many times resulting in a lot of difficulty trying to understand what the authors mean to say. At times it is impossible to decipher. The recommendation is that the research report is rewritten from the ground up also to address the problems and issues pinpointed above. Additionally, the draft report should be carefully proofread, preferably by a person whose first language is English.