Online learning has become part of routine higher education through learning management systems, video platforms, recorded materials, synchronous sessions, and blended course designs. However, many evaluations still rely on access logs, satisfaction ratings, or completion indicators, which show whether students used an online course but do not clarify whether lower engagement is associated with platform usability, instructional support, interaction quality, learning flexibility, psychological need satisfaction, or a specific engagement dimension1. Online learning experience should therefore not be reduced to a single satisfaction score. Prior online engagement research emphasizes learner-content, learner-instructor, and learner-learner interaction as important elements of students’ online learning experience2. The present protocol measures online learning experience through platform usability, instructional support, interaction quality, and learning flexibility.
Learning engagement is also multidimensional. It includes behavioral participation, cognitive investment, and emotional involvement. Online-course engagement instruments show that engagement cannot be fully represented by visible participation or task completion alone3. Broader educational technology research also shows that behavioral engagement is often easier to observe than cognitive or affective engagement4. For this reason, the protocol measures learning engagement through behavioral, cognitive, and emotional engagement rather than collapsing engagement into one undifferentiated score.
Self-determination theory provides the theoretical basis for linking online learning experience with learning engagement. Basic psychological need theory identifies autonomy, competence, and relatedness as central conditions for motivation and adjustment5. In online learning, autonomy refers to perceived choice and control, competence to perceived capability in completing learning tasks, and relatedness to felt connection with instructors and classmates. Prior online learning studies using self-determination theory have linked contextual support, need satisfaction, motivation, and engagement6,7. These findings support examining basic psychological needs as an indirect-association construct between online learning experience and learning engagement, while avoiding causal interpretation because the data are cross-sectional.
A methodological problem in online engagement research is the lack of consistent operational structure. Studies vary in how they define learning conditions, measure engagement, and connect the learning environment to students’ psychological experience8. Self-report surveys are also vulnerable to careless responding, patterned answers, post hoc exclusions, missing-data decisions, and common method bias9. Therefore, this protocol fixes the English-language questionnaire structure, item-source mapping, scoring rules, electronic consent procedure, eligibility screening, attention-check rule, completion-time threshold, straight-lining criterion, long-string response check, missing-data handling, model specification, and dataset-locking procedure before structural analysis begins.
The conceptual framework specifies online learning experience as the independent construct, basic psychological needs as the indirect-association construct, and learning engagement as the outcome construct. The primary pathway tests whether online learning experience is associated with basic psychological needs, whether basic psychological needs are associated with learning engagement, and whether online learning experience remains directly associated with learning engagement after accounting for basic psychological needs. The protocol is guided by four research questions: whether the structured survey protocol can measure the three constructs with acceptable response quality and construct reliability; whether online learning experience is positively associated with basic psychological needs and learning engagement; whether the association between online learning experience and learning engagement is partly carried through basic psychological needs as an indirect association; and whether psychological-need subdimension analyses and regression-based robustness checks support the same interpretation as the primary PLS-SEM workflow.
This article is positioned as a method-focused contribution rather than a conventional explanatory cross-sectional study. The protocol provides a reproducible workflow for questionnaire adaptation, expert review, pilot testing, survey administration, response screening, construct scoring, measurement-model assessment, structural pathway testing, indirect-association analysis, sensitivity analysis, robustness checking, and reproducibility file locking. Transparent educational research workflows require analytic decisions to be documented before final model interpretation10. Partial least squares structural equation modeling is used because it allows measurement and structural components to be examined within one workflow, with reflective first-order constructs and analytically derived higher-order construct scores through a disjoint two-stage approach11. Prior work on online student engagement, social presence, learner support, and retention shows that communication, support, connection, and inclusive course design matter beyond simple access or flexibility12,13. Systematic reviews further indicate that behavioral, cognitive, and emotional engagement may respond differently to online learning conditions14. Representative results are therefore used only to demonstrate the output of the protocol, not to claim causal effects from cross-sectional survey data15.