An Exploratory Study of the Drivers of Student Satisfaction and Learning Experience in Hybrid-Online and Purely Online Marketing Courses

Much of the existing research in distance education has focused on contrasting the outcomes between traditional face-to-face teaching and purely online courses, in which the entire course content is delivered online. However, research has not examined the effectiveness of hybrid-online courses, in which a combination of online delivery and face-to-face classroom teaching is used, especially in the context of marketing courses. This paper examines student experiences and learning outcomes in purely online and hybrid-online course formats. For both formats, student satisfaction is found to be affected by the course content, student-teacher communications, the use of effective learning tools, and the instructor. Improvements in perceived learning and course performance scores are observed for the hybrid-online format in the context of a qualitative marketing course while no such benefits are observed for a technical marketing course. The results indicate that the merits of different distance learning approaches need to be evaluated in the specific context of each course and that the benefits of integrating face-to-face meetings into online marketing courses are course specific.