The results from the PSOL were waiting for me in my inbox when I returned from vacation on Sunday. I haven’t been able to do a full analysis just yet, but the preliminary look is very encouraging. I will be making several posts to this blog over the next couple of months detailing what we’ve learned from our online students from this fourth administration of the Noel-Levitz survey.

In broad strokes, of the 26 items on the standard PSOL, our students were more satisfied than the national average on 21 items, and less satisfied on only 5. Even better, the mean differences for those five items were not statistically significant from the national average. Better still, ten of the positive differences were statistically significant when compared to the national average. Here are the ten items: (click to enlarge)

The asterisks system works as follows: 3 stars (***) indicates that the difference is significant at the .001 level. 2 stars (**) is a significance level of .01, and one star (*) is the .05 level.

We also have comparison data from the 2006 survey and the 2008 survey and I will be asking for a peer group report as soon as I get a chance. Once again the aggregate Minnesota Online data is not very pretty, but I’ll be posting some info soon about how our results compare with our consortium results.

Even though this is my first post on the 2008 results, I should probably repeat that I don’t actually put much stock in comparisons to the national group data since the demographics of that big group are not very comparable to our students. However, it is one of many comparisons that I make in order to see the whole picture.