The relationship of selected personal characteristics of e-faculty to their perceived technological knowledge

Abstract

This study investigated the technological development of e-faculty at five randomly selected Carnegie classified (2006) Doctorate-Granting Research Universities with very high research activity (RU/VH) in the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB). The majority of e-faculty report that they do not have release time/reduced teaching load for preparing web-based materials/courses, nor do they have graduate or teaching assistants available for assisting with web-based learning. However, a little over half of them reported having instructional designers or curriculum developers to help with the designing of web-based materials and a large majority reported having adequate institutional research resources (library holdings that are accessible by web and technical support). E-faculty reported that student technical support resources are offered in almost all cases and over two-thirds (76.35%) reported that those resources were offered seven days a week. The technical support resources for e-faculty were also offered in almost all cases, but only 63.77% reported the resource was available to them seven days a week. A large majority of e-faculty report that they do not receive sources of funding for e-learning course technology training/conferences. However, almost half of them (44.50%) report that the funding that they receive for e-learning technology events/work is adequate. The self-learning subconstructs of the BISL© describe e-faculty most of the time. E-faculty perceive that they have moderate technology knowledge, good teaching self-efficacy and minor technology anxiety. Three variables, technology anxiety, self-efficacy and perceived level of support explain a large amount of the variance (over half) in perceived technology knowledge of e-faculty. Therefore, as technology anxiety decreases and self efficacy and perceived level of support increase, the perceived technology knowledge of e-faculty increases