Reducing non-response bias with survey reweighting: applications for online learning researchers

In many online courses, information about learners is collected via surveys for accounting, instructional design, and research purposes. Aggregate information from such surveys is frequently reported in news articles and research papers, among other publications. While some authors acknowledge the potential bias due to non-response in course surveys, there are no investigations on the severity of the bias and methods for bias reduction in the online education context. A regression-based response-propensity model is described and applied to reweight a course survey, and discrepancies between adjusted and unadjusted outcome distributions are provided.