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Top1. Introduction
Online learning, also known as electronic learning online learning is a rapidly changing trend in education. The coronavirus pandemic applied greater pressure on organizations and countries to adopt a variety of electronic platforms for teaching and training purposes. Furthermore, a growing number of international studies have focused on students’ emotional, physiological, and spiritual health as well as their academic progress and learning Jagodics and Szabó (2022). They found that students could not continue their learning and, in many cases, just dropped out (Jagodics & Szabó, 2022; Krupnick, 2022; Rump, Esdar, & Wild, 2017). Based on Krupnick (2022) of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, the report has shown that there was an increase in dropout rates of 3.9% compared to the previous year (2021) because of variety of reasons (depression, anxiety, and so forth). According to Tamin (2013), dropouts are mostly associated with social-cultural or psychological reasons. In recent years many scholars have focused on student burnout, which is a serious problem (Farina, Ornaghi, Pepe, Fiorilli, & Grazzani, 2020).
Many prior studies focused on student’s burnout in traditional learning environments (Nevryuev, Sychev, & Sarieva, 2022; Rimpelä et al., 2020). However, how much the digitalization of university pedagogy has affected the academic well-being of students is still unclear. According to Koivuneva and Ruokamo (2022), after their systematic literature review work, commented “While the variations in different digital education platforms increase, it has yet to be examined how students perceive digital learning environments (positive and negative feeling) and how they are connected to students’ learning processes and academic well-being” (Koivuneva & Ruokamo, 2022, p. 2).
Since psychological pressure is considered one of the important barrier against academic success (Nathani & Srivastava, 2023), we present Burnout Model as one important theoretical platform to study the negative effects of online learning on students’ perceptions. We improved this model, by adding student’s satisfaction to measure how well the online learning system is serving student’s needs to learn. Satisfaction and system quality are among the key factors to measure online learning system success. In this regard, high satisfaction means successful adoption, less pressure in online learning adoption, increased participation and work by groups, and lower rates of attrition from anxiety and depression.
Accordingly, understanding the amount of pressure that end-users face when using online learning systems is critical for studying the positive or negative effects on satisfaction, and accordingly, their preference for online learning versus face-to-face communications when end-users perceived these system have high quality features. One important research gap is that prior research on the combination of satisfaction with online learning burnout was not well explored. Most of these studies mainly focused on the positive effect of online learning and studied the relationship between satisfaction and intention to actual / continue use (Paechter & Maier, 2010; Rajeh et al., 2021). Yunusa and Umar (2021) did a systematic literature review on satisfaction and perceived online learning and found a “mixed grill of factors” that affected the efficacy of online learning systems. They concluded that the most prevalent limitations weakened their findings were methodological, potential self-reporting bias, and cross-sectional. Accordingly, they concluded that further research on online learning was needed to identify the predictive factors of satisfaction.