Motivators

What makes faculty teach online?  What motivates instructors to step outside their comfort zone and try a differnt course delivey? Are there factors that would inhibit or de-motivate faculty from instucting online?  Qualitative research at a medium sized Eastern U.S. university in the Spring of 2006 revealed that certain common motivators exist to promote as well as inhibit faculty desire to teach online. 

According to Hiltz, Kim, and Shea in their 2007 paper to the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, five common motivators surfaced to explain why faculty would want to teach online.  Most notable of these factors was the inherent flexibility of online instruction.  Other factors, in order of decreasing importance, were better personal interaction through medium to improve pedagogy; challenge to develop creative skills along with professional development; ability to reach a more diverse student audience; and better course development. 

De-motivators (Hiltz et al., term, not mine, but I like the contrast and it's simple) that could inhibit faculty from teaching online included, foremost, the perception of doing more work with inadequate compensation; medium problems; lack of institutional support and/or adequate policies for online teaching; the inability to make online teaching fit all students; ineffective or poor evaluation; and lack of recognition.

Clearly, emotional factors exist to support a faculty member's decision to teach or not teach online, or to continue online teaching.  Flexibility, especially when the instructor is accomodating some of the same external demands as the students, is as powerful a motivator as the perception of doing more work for less compensation is de-motivator. 

Interestingly enough, very few faculty considered technical skill to be a factor.  Conversely, when technology was mentioned it was under the construct of being a challenge to learn new skills, or as a complaint that sufficient technical support didn't exist.  In other words, faculty isn't worried about technical skill--they either have it or will develop it.

A future quantitative study is planned, but I'm not so sure that study will illuminate the data any more than just adding a 'measurable' number.  This study's findings, in my opinion, are sufficient enough to generate effective thought on online teaching motivation and de-motivation.

Here's a link to a site that hosts the conference's proceeding.  You can purchase the document or check your library.  http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentCon.jsp?punumber=4076361

Digital Immigrants

I read another interesting commentary recently.  The author, Shirly Duglin Kennedy, provided some cogent, pithy thoughts on social networking and the citizens who comprise this segment of the digital community.  She discussed the impact of technology on older and younger workers, some pertinent demographics on social networking participants, and made reference to digital natives (you know, the generation that's grown up with all this wonderful digital technology) and the digital immigrants (you know, those who grew up speaking analog but learned to speak digital out of necessity).  Kennedy makes an excellent point that just because some new technology or application is, well, new, does not necessarily mean that it has any application at all.  That's brings us to the tie-in between any technology and its importance to e-learning.  While technology can certainly make our lives easier to manage and can keep us connected in ways so far removed from the 1800s Pony Express as to be almost unimaginable, we need to make sure that any technology we use to deliver our e-message is the right application for the right audience at the right time.  And with that responsibility comes the requirement that we need to know how to use the technology, be we 'immigrants' or 'natives.'

Here's the link to where you can either read the abstract or purchase Kennedy's article in Information Today:  http://tinyurl.com/ykw97ul.  If you don't choose to buy the article, here's a link to a site she references that provides robust social networking demographics and data--I recommend bookmarking this one:  http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/01/11/a-collection-of-soical-network-stats-for-2009/