Building Trust in E-Learning

As Web-based course delivery continues to emerge and thrive as a legitimate alternative to classroom instruction, educational institutions and online instructors face the challenge of building and sustaining student trust in e-learning. The present study represents an attempt to address the challenge by identifying the social and technical factors that can likely induce or influence students’ perception about the trustworthiness of an e-learning course and integrating the factors into a socio-technical framework that can be empirically validated. The methodology used and the data obtained from a university-wide survey conducted in an American university are reported in this paper. The results indicate that two underlying dimensions, Course Instruction and Privacy and Security, exist among the 12 trust-inducing factors. Although all 12 factors were found to contribute to the respondents’ perception of the trustworthiness of an e-learning course, the Course Instruction dimension was rated about 10% higher than the Privacy and Security dimension. This suggests that the social and course design factors (e.g., reputation, design quality, instructor sociocommunicative style), when used effectively, can help overcome students’ privacy and security concerns for an e-learning course. The study makes at least two important contributions to the field by proposing a framework of 12 trust-inducing factors for e-learning and by extending the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to a new application area of trust evaluation in e-learning.