Massage therapy education online: student satisfaction and achievement, part I.

In recent years, providers of massage therapy education have, in growing numbers, started to use online technologies to support the learning processes of their students. Using a narrative review of the existing online learning literature, this paper aims to provide a solid pedagogical foundation for these early explorations. It identifies five key factors-instructional pedagogy, quality of instruction, interaction and communication, individual learner qualities, and the online interface-that contribute to student satisfaction and achievement in the online context. The relationships between those factors and the experience of the online learner are discussed with reference to maximization of student satisfaction and achievement.