Faculty adoption of teaching and learning technologies: Contrasting earlier adopters and mainstream faculty

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Varnhagen, Stanley
  • Anderson, Terry
  • Campbell, Katherine

• The adoption of teaching and learning technologies is an innovation that challenges the structure, culture and practice of modern research universities. This paper documents quantitatively and qualitatively the attitudes, skills and behavior of the faculty related to the use of instructional technology at a large Canadian research university. The data was gathered from a survey (n = 557) of teaching faculty. The data is analyzed with respect to Roger's (1995) categories of adoption of innovation differentiating \"Earlier Adopters\" (EAs) from \"Mainstream Faculty\" (MF). The paper discusses four factors that have tended to create a \"chasm\" between these two groups and discusses strategies for reducing the chasm and providing support and incentive for all faculty in the adoption of instructional technologies.

• Date created

  1998-01-01

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Mainstream faculty
  • Early adopters
  • Teaching technogy
  • Learning technology

• Type of Item

  Article (Published)

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3M90230Q

• License

  © 1998 Terry Anderson. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial 2.5 Canada License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/ca/), which permits you to copy, distribute, display, perform, and make derivatives of the work, provided the original author and source are credited, and the work is not used for commercial purposes.