A Survey and Protocol for Assessing Online Learning Experience, Basic Psychological Needs, and Learning Engagement in University Students

Summary

This protocol provides a reproducible survey and partial least squares structural equation modeling workflow for assessing association pathways among online learning experience, basic psychological needs, and learning engagement in university students, including questionnaire adaptation, screening, measurement assessment, indirect-association testing, robustness checks, and reproducibility records.

Abstract

Online learning is embedded in higher education, but evaluations often rely on access, satisfaction, or completion indicators that do not identify where engagement problems arise. This article presents a reproducible English-language survey and partial least squares structural equation modeling protocol for assessing association pathways among online learning experience, basic psychological needs, and learning engagement in university students. Online learning experience is measured through platform usability, instructional support, interaction quality, and learning flexibility; basic psychological needs through autonomy, competence, and relatedness; and learning engagement through behavioral, cognitive, and emotional engagement. The workflow specifies item-source mapping, questionnaire adaptation, expert review, pilot testing, electronic consent, eligibility screening, response-quality checks, construct scoring, common method bias diagnostics, higher-order construct estimation, measurement-model assessment, structural pathway testing, indirect-association analysis, psychological-need sensitivity analysis, regression-based robustness checks, and reproducibility file locking. Representative results from 386 valid responses demonstrate acceptable reliability, moderate construct correlations, retained measurement quality, a supported indirect association through basic psychological needs, nonsignificant control paths, and uneven dimensional scores. The protocol supports transparent diagnosis of how online learning experience is associated with psychological need satisfaction and engagement while avoiding causal interpretation from cross-sectional survey data.

Introduction

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 o....

Protocol

The study protocol was reviewed and approved by the Universiti Malaya Research Ethics Committee (Non-Medical) under approval number UM.TNC (P&I)/UMREC_4892 on 7 August 2025. Conduct all procedures in accordance with institutional guidelines for research involving human participants. Obtain electronic informed consent before administering the questionnaire. Use anonymous participant codes during recruitment, screening, scoring, analysis, and file storage. The research tools and software are listed in the Table of Materials.

1. Define the study design and analytical framework

1. Use a cross-sectional....

Results

Final analytic dataset and participant characteristics

The final analytic dataset included 386 university students. Formal recruitment was conducted from 18 August 2025 to 26 September 2025 through university learning platforms, course communication groups, student email lists, and institutional student channels. A total of 432 submitted responses were screened, and 386 responses were retained, giving a valid-response rate of 89.4%. The locked dataset contained 33 substantive .......

Discussion

This protocol provides a reproducible methodological workflow for assessing association pathways among online learning experience, basic psychological needs, and learning engagement in university students. Rather than treating online learning as a single condition, the protocol separates the perceived learning environment into platform usability, instructional support, interaction quality, and learning flexibility. This structure allows researchers to identify which part of the online learning experience is most closely .......

Materials

List of materials used in this article

Name	Company	Catalog Number	Comments
Qualtrics online survey platform	Qualtrics	Institutional account; version not applicable	Used to administer the anonymous English-language questionnaire, including consent confirmation, eligibility screening, required-response settings, AC1 attention-check item, response-time recording, and data export.
Microsoft Excel for Microsoft 365	Microsoft Corporation	Microsoft 365 institutional version	Used to store the raw exported dataset, cleaned dataset, codebook, screening log, construct-score file, and verification records in .xlsx and .csv formats.
G*Power	Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf	G*Power 3.1.9.7	Used for a priori sample-size and power checking before recruitment.
SmartPLS	SmartPLS GmbH	SmartPLS 4.1 Professional	Used for the primary PLS-SEM workflow, including disjoint two-stage higher-order construct estimation, measurement-model assessment, structural-pathway testing, bootstrapping, R², f², and model-output export.
R statistical software	R Foundation / CRAN	R 4.4.1	Used for descriptive statistics, Pearson correlations, common method bias diagnostics, and regression-based robustness analysis.
R package: psych	CRAN	psych 2.4.6	Used for descriptive statistics, reliability checks, and psychometric summaries.
R package: boot	CRAN	boot 1.3-30	Used for bootstrap-based regression robustness checks.
R package: semPlot	CRAN	semPlot 1.1.6	Used only for optional path-diagram cross-checking when R-based visual verification is needed.
OneDrive for Business or SharePoint version history	Microsoft Corporation	Microsoft 365 institutional account	Used to store the verification folder and preserve version history for raw data, cleaned data, codebook, screening log, SmartPLS outputs, R scripts, and supplementary files.
Questionnaire and coding file	Author-prepared study file	Supplementary File 1	Contains the final questionnaire, item-source mapping, variable names, coding rules, dimension-score formulas, global construct-score formulas, and data-handling rules.
Screening and reproducibility record	Author-prepared study file	Supplementary File 2	Contains final dataset verification, screening checks, missing-data record, reliability results, common method bias diagnostics, measurement-model output, structural-model output, indirect-association results, sensitivity analysis, robustness record, and final consistency checklist.
Figure-preparation software	Adobe Illustrator or equivalent vector-editing software	Institutional version	Used to prepare publication-ready workflow and structural-model figures.