Although only a slight improvement this year, this continues the year-over-year improvement that can be seen by looking at the average satisfaction scores for the 26 basic items in the PSOL.

These slides show the comparisons between our 2008 PSOL results and the 2008 SSI (student Satisfaction Inventory) results. There are eleven questions that match up between the two surveys, including some that we added for that very purpose.
[slideshare id=591501&doc=psolssi2008charts-1221054827135496-8&w=425]
To clarify: here are the questions that were compared from the two groups.

PSOL #
SSI #
Item

01
45
This [...]

Once again, Minnesota Online will be sponsoring the use of the PSOL for all interested schools in the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. LSC will be participating again this year after taking last year off. The survey will be available to students in February and we will likely have the results in the latter part [...]

It’s one thing to get the data about importance to students and their related levels of satisfaction, it’s quite another to be able to do anything about those things. On the one hand you might have an opportunity to manage student expectations which could possibly affect either importance or satisfaction, or both. On the [...]

I’ve been asked to supply some data backing up my claim that students place a low level of importance on the idea of developing a sense of community in their e-learning opportunities. I have spoken about this at various times, including three days ago during a keynote presentation about the myths and realities of e-Learning [...]

Questions 37-43 on the PSOL simply gather information about how important the different sources of information are to students when they are looking for information about online programs. Not surprisingly, campus web sites and online catalogs rank highly in importance, while printed catalogs and college representatives (recruiters, etc.) rank much lower.
By far the lowest importance [...]

The chart below shows some of the normal differences that you can expect to see in the satisfaction levels of different groups of students.

These four questions were among the top rated as far as importance for Lake Superior College students in the FY06 survey administration. The chart indicates the satisfaction scores on these four important [...]

In July 2006 I attended the annual Noel-Levitz conference in Denver. The first day was a client workshop on the various N-L surveys of student satisfaction and importance, such as the SSI (Student Satisfaction Inventory) and the PSOL (Priorities Survey for Online Learners). They had just updated the overall results for the PSOL. [...]

Noel-Levitz surveys are generally of very high quality and the PSOL fits that description. It is the only nationally-normed satisfaction survey that focuses on the online learners that I was aware of when we first used it in 2004. Using it three years in a row gave us a good baseline for measuring overall satisfaction [...]

The PSOL is made up of various types of questions. A PDF of the survey is available here. Please keep in mind that this survey is the copyrighted property of Noel-Levitz.

The most useful information comes from the 36 Priorities questions. There are 26 standard questions (used for national averages) and you can add 10 more [...]

This blog will be used to document, publicize, and share the results from the Priorities Survey for Online Learners (PSOL). This survey has been administered in 2004, 2005, and 2006 at Lake Superior College. The next planned adminisrtation is in Spring 2008.
The survey is produced and managed by Noel-Levitz.