Students’ Satisfaction and Service Quality in Distance Education During COVID-19 Pandemic in Jordan

Abstract

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the global lock-down to ensure the social distancing, the education sector was one of the affected sectors if not the most affected one, so most of the educational institutions started distance education to keep up with their academic calendars and try to limit the losses as much as they can until the writing of this research it is not certainly known if this situation could last for more one or two semesters, and the end of this pandemic is not clear yet, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations it became a necessity to learn how to accept and coexist with this situation especially in sectors like education which has high risk of the virus spreading if the return to normal in-class education was done before the end of this pandemic.Owing to these facts the quality of distance education was investigated in this research using the SERVQUAL model, by examining the students’ satisfaction and the service quality of reliability, assurance, responsiveness, empathy, and tangibles to find the correlation and gaps between perceived and expected service, which can help in improving the distance education, which may continue for more semesters or be integrated within the traditional in-class education.