Abstract:

E-Learning has developed astonishingly in the last decade, and especially after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the last five years also the most prestigious universities have joined this modality.

The reputation of the university or education center is one of the relevant factors considered when making a decision to embark in a course, or a program. Students “trust” the institution because of the cumulated good reputation over time. However, e-learning implies new processes and technology that involve many actors and require mastery of technology.

Trust is an intangible resource for both individuals and organizations. The concept describes the positive expectations of a person in relation to another’s also in situations of risk. The same apply to groups and organizations, including education institutions.

Making oneself vulnerable entails taking a risk, and implies that there is something of importance to be lost. In the case of online courses, it is mostly time and monetary resources. Intrinsically trust is a fragile intangible asset, usually “invisible”, even “tacit”, but its benefits and consequences may be multifaceted and become visible within organizations and between actors.

Trust is multi-level and evolves over time, through repeated interactions. Trusting relationships imply trustworthiness. Credibility, fairness, competence with good intentions, and benevolence belong to the widely recognized dimensions of trustworthiness.

Education involve many processes and actors, including support processes, that in online courses are very visible, through multiple interactions. This research aimed to investigate what factors in online courses contributed to create or destroy trust towards the courses and the education institutes. To respond to the research question – what factors contribute to build or destroy trust in the learning process in online courses – we selected seven online courses, received by two of the three researchers. Of the courses:
i) two were master degree (one of one-year length, the other two years), provided by two different universities in Spain, which used platforms managed by them (Canvas, Moodle);
ii) one course of 17 weeks length, provided by one university in Latin America;
iii) four courses of executive education, of 8 weeks length in average, provided by universities from United States, through subcontracted platforms (two different enterprises). The data were collected from 2018 to 2023.

During the process of receiving the training, the two researchers who received the courses used a diary to identify every event that contributed positively, to building, or negatively, to trust destroy. Based on grounded theory principles, the researchers conducted a global analysis of the collected data to identify the categories and subcategories of items contributing to trust, in positive and negative way, along the education process, from registration to receiving the certificate. The data was analyzed using content analysis, of interpretative nature.

By responding the research question, the paper advances the understanding on how the support processes and the use of technology (platforms) in online courses have high impact on trust towards the education institution, so they should not be trivialized. This is of special importance when prestigious universities subcontract the delivering of the courses to service providers (e.g. GetSmarter, Emeritus).

Keywords:

Education, e-learning, online courses, trust, trustworthiness.