METHODOLGY
Introduction
To understand the rate and level of instructional technology incorporation into the teaching and learning process, the beliefs that a faculty member holds toward the construct of teaching must be the first factor examined. The second consideration must be whether instructional technology fits into the intrinsic belief system of an individual faculty member. Only after this examination will it be possible for administrators and technology personnel to adequately address and resolve extrinsic barriers. The purpose of this study was to explore how intrinsic fundamental beliefs about teaching, the notion of who a person is as a teacher, not extrinsic resource-based barriers, may cause faculty to resist or to support instructional technology incorporation.
Setting
The study took place at The University of Alabama, a Carnegie-classified Doctoral/Research University—Extensive, and a member of the National Association of State Universities & Land Grant Colleges (NASULGC). The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) accredits the University. The University has approximately 20,000 students and 900 full-time instructional faculty and is divided into 11 instructional schools, which are Arts and Sciences, Commerce and Business Administration, Communication and Information Sciences, Community Health Sciences, Continuing Studies, Education, Engineering, Human Environmental Sciences, Nursing, Law, and Social Work. There are 84 undergraduate degree programs, 75 master programs, 7 educational specialist programs, 57 doctoral programs, and 1 law program.
Background
The Faculty Resource Center
The Faculty Resource Center (FRC) at The University of Alabama is a support unit whose mission is to support faculty in the incorporation of technology into teaching, research, and service. The unit has a professional staff of 10 and provides technical and pedagogic support to faculty in the design and development of instructional materials utilizing current and emerging educational technologies. The staff also consults with faculty on integrating electronic information resources into courses, including creating guides, tutorials, and reference lists. The FRC encourages and supports the development of faculty projects that use multimedia and information technology to support instruction. To help achieve these goals, the FRC has, for the past seven years, conducted diverse workshops and seminars geared at training and supporting faculty. These workshops have altered as demand has changed. Originally, the workshops consisted of three-hour long weekly sessions during the academic semester and weeklong sessions during the summer months. During the academic semester, the sessions progressed from simple to more difficult. Typically, the semester workshops began with topics that covered basic concepts such as making, copying, and moving files and subdirectories. Workshops then moved to more complex issues like file transfer protocol (ftp), file zipping, and basic web theory. More complicated topics and programs were introduced after the faculty member was, ideally, more confident and comfortable with the basics. In summer workshops, over a one-week period, faculty participants were taught all the technology they could possibly need to put a web site or web course online. They were introduced to programs that are the mainstay of web technology professionals. The emphasis of these workshops was on learning applications.
In effect, these workshops were addressing the extrinsic barriers of lack of knowledge, but did little else to assist faculty in their technology incorporation and instructional implementation. The workshops did not deal with the other identified extrinsic barriers of deficiencies in institutional support, financial support, or time. Additionally, not only did other barriers beyond basic lack of technology expertise need to be addressed, but also the emphasis had to shift more intrinsically, toward pedagogy and educational goals, and away from technology. As Donovan and Macklin (1998) found, faculty were, at this point, actually not interested in acquiring a technology skill; they wanted to know how to perform specific tasks that were applicable to their disciplines or fields, and they wanted to be able to retain the knowledge and be equipped to repeat these tasks once they returned to their offices.
In an effort to address these barriers, the Faculty Resource Center redesigned its workshop structure. The regular academic year sessions were cancelled, and the summer workshop instead of being a single week, now became two weeks long; the faculty were paid for their time, and the main objective was that each participant would create, via the course management system WebCT, an entire course that realized concrete pedagogic principles. The workshop was organized with the idea that the technical, or extrinsic, and the pedagogic, or intrinsic, would interact with and build upon each other. Emphasis was placed on the concept that pedagogy and, most especially, the final goal of creating a complete WebCT course would be paramount. Only enough technology would be taught to realize the pedagogic goal; in the past, sessions on a particular technology would cover as many possible aspects of the program that could be packed into a 3-hour session. During this workshop, participants were taught only the parts of that technology they needed to know in order to achieve the task at hand, whether that be creating the obligatory syllabus or working with lecture materials.
After three separate implementations, informal interviews, questionnaires, and personal communications have shown even though this workshop addressed all the remaining barriers—lack of time, lack of money, lack of institutional support, the faculty were not necessarily retaining more technological information, nor were they using more instructional technology methods in their teaching than did faculty from previous workshops. According to the literature on conducting faculty workshops (Cagle & Hornik, 2001; Littlejohn & Sclater, 1999; Millis, 1994; Padgett & Conceicao-Runlee, 2000; Shapiro & Cartwright, 1998; White & Myers, 2001), the FRC was in line with the research, but the faculty were still resisting. What this seemed to mean is that the faculty were not convinced that using technology was beneficial in terms of educational gains, nor in terms of time and effort saved. Indeed, the Faculty Resource Center was not alone in its inability to facilitate faculty in incorporating technology into their instruction. All of this pointed to the supposition that lack of faculty incorporation must be due not to issues of resources, but to something more fundamental. Solidification of this idea that something deeper was occurring that caused faculty to resist incorporation of instructional technology came in the results of two separate studies, conducted a year apart. The results of both of these studies were the source of this dissertation study.