Abstract
Academic leaders can better implement institutional strategic plans to promote online programs if they understand faculty perceptions about teaching online. An extended version of a model for technology acceptance, or TAM2 (Venkatesh & Davis, 2000), provided a framework for surveying and organizing the research literature about factors that have influenced faculty’s adoption of online delivery methods for courses and their willingness to continue to teach online. This paper presents the results of a synthesis of 67 empirical studies about faculty teaching online published between 1995 and 2015, using TAM2 constructs as an organizing framework. This validated model provided a lens for understanding research about faculty perceptions of the user-friendliness and ease of use of technology for online course delivery, as well as the overall experience of teaching online. Studies in this review revealed concerns among faculty regarding their perceived barriers to student success in online classes, uncertainty about their image as online instructors, technical support needs, and their desire for reasonable workload and manageable class enrollments in online classes.
Highlights
Higher education faculty in the United States are increasingly being asked to teach online (Allen & Seaman, 2015)
To determine the application of the TAM by discipline, we narrowed our search to major journals in various fields that were likely to be concerned with technology acceptance, again using the search terms “Technology Acceptance Model” or “TAM.” Results showed significantly more research rooted in the TAM in business than in other disciplines: Business Search Premier = 124 (59% of total); Education Full Text = 34 (16% of total); Library/Information Science/Technology Abstracts = 32 (15% of total); and CINAHL Plus with Full Text = 20 (9.5% of total)
We organized this review according to each construct in the model, beginning with studies that addressed faculty’s perceived ease of use (PEU) of technology for online course delivery and exploring the various determinants of perceived usefulness (PU)
Summary
Higher education faculty in the United States are increasingly being asked to teach online (Allen & Seaman, 2015). Despite its utility for understanding acceptance of new technology by the users, the TAM2 has not been applied to systematically study faculty acceptance of technology to deliver online courses This paper addresses this gap and presents the results of the synthesis of the research literature regarding faculty perceptions about teaching online, using constructs in the TAM2 (Venkatesh & Davis, 2000) as an organizing framework. Theoretical Framework We used a model of technology acceptance by users in organizations, validated by Venkatesh and Davis (2000) and based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) (Davis, 1989) to guide the review of research literature that explored factors influencing faculty’s perceptions of online teaching. Each of these factors will be discussed in more detail further in this article
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