THE DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF THE ONLINE LEARNING CLIMATE SCALE: A THREE-PHASE STUDY

With the increasing popularity of and demand for online learning in higher education (Konetes, 2011) comes a need to examine students’ perceptions about classroom climate in these environments. Using the Instructional Beliefs Model (IBM) as a theoretical framework, this dissertation proposes the online learning climate (OLCS) scale for doing so. Informed by both organizational and instructional communication, as well as education, the scale consists of several variables related to instructor role(s) and behaviors, student characteristics, and course-specific structural issues to explain how students perceive climate within a computer-mediated classroom. Ultimately, this three-phase study consisted of: (a) constructing the OLCS, (b) establishing factor structure, as well as concurrent and convergent validity, and (c) establishing the scale’s discriminant validity, confirming its factorial structure, and testing three theoretical models.