Lit. Review on Faculty Participate of Online Ed.

Today I'm keeping up with my reading - I will do more, but I wanted to start logging and summarizing my notes while they were fresh. I worked on the article by Loréal Maguire (2005) Faculty Participation in Online Distance Education: Barriers and Motivators.

The work by the author set-out to examine the view of faculty in higher education towards teaching through distance education. At the beginning it provides multiple definitions of what online learning is, but settles as based on asynchronous teaching and learning, web-based and online format.

Some of the benefits it presents for both faculty and students are:

• Interaction between faculty and students increases
• Reaching larger number of learner
• Increased diversification and globalization
• Meeting needs of non-traditional students
• New stream of students without on-campus facilities

The review was limited to published work within the last 10 years of publication (1995-2005), and used both qualitative and quantitative data for the work.

Some of the recorded information showed that intrinsic motivators for faculty are stronger than extrinsic and that faculty members, would like to showcase what others have done using and applying (implementing) technology. Faculty also describe befits such as:

• Lead to development of new ideas and diversification of programs
• Helps meeting needs of students, increasing student access

Inhibitors are mostly extrinsic. These factors include resistance to change and intimidation by technology. Job security is mostly the source of the intimidation by the technology, as well as what courses should be taught online. Extrinsic inhibitors include:

• Perceived lower quality in courses
• Concerns with misinformation
• Online is not appropriate for traditional students, leading to a decrease in student interaction
• Copyright and intellectual property
• Workload; time used in development is time taken from research
• Lack of recognition, mostly towards tenure and promotion
• Merit pay or stipends for development, or teaching online
• Lack of tech-support

The author continues to conclude that the literature does not consider cultural or contextual influences in higher education for distance education. Finally it concludes with potential questions for further research on the field.

Personal Note: Interestingly, while the article is 10 years form current date (2015) some of the topics and themes are still prevalent in the faculty discourse. Something not mentioned in the summary, but discussed in the article is the participation of the administrators. The review found some of the perceptions of administrators and in some cases it agreed with opinions from the faculty, while in others - specifically intrinsic in nature - it disagreed.