Relationships among relational coordination dimensions: Impact on the quality of education online with a structural equations model

摘要

Online education is quite often applied to university systems. This kind of education does not present scheduled restrictions to students and provides additional flexibility to the learning process. This together with the improvements provided by the application of information and communications technology (ICT) in higher education online systems allows them to reach higher degrees of the coordination and integration of processes by improving the competitiveness and research capacity of these organizations. Relational coordination is a validated tool for measuring and analyzing the quality of communication and relationships amongst participants of any process by considering functional organizational boundaries. The goal of this study is the analysis of the relationship between the relational coordination and the quality of online education systems at universities. A questionnaire has been built and distributed to 243 students. Data were processed by using the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique. Results show that higher levels of relational coordination at a university lead to higher levels of the quality of education.