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Is Your Community College Technology Ready? An Assessment Instrument to Promote Technology Adoption

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  • Background: Calls by presidents and legislators to raise the U.S. college graduation rate to 60% by 2025 have required educational institutions to find ways to increase accessibility and quality while simultaneously reducing costs (Bautsch, 2018; Smith, 2017). Private foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are getting involved to scrutinize and question the value of higher education credentials, especially as costs continue to increase (Seltzer, 2019). At hand is the question of higher educations’ return on investment as student borrowing escalates while affordability, flexibility, and outcome-orientation lags (Kreighbaum, 2019). Thus, technology has become a key factor in addressing these challenges. Furthermore, the changing student demographic indicates community colleges are at the forefront of educational delivery to students with varied cultural, social, and economic backgrounds accompanied by a myriad of expectations surrounding knowledge attainment, relevant skill development, and future employment goals (Boggs & McPhail, 2016; O'Banion, 2019). Unfortunately, many educators assume the technology itself is the critical element in leveraging accessible learning, innovative practice, and overall student success. Colleges rush to purchase and implement technologies aimed at increasing student engagement, retention, and completion, but have ignored the overall impact of the change and the elements of successful innovation (Barrington, 2019; Cator, 2019). Lacking are actions, processes, and tools to determine if the college, students, or employees are ready to adopt the technology, or if the technology is achieving its intended objectives (Chen, 2019). Purpose: This research study explores and develops a community college technology readiness instrument, which community college stakeholders can use to support technology adoption. The study will elaborate on the topic of technology integration at community colleges and specifically focus on technology readiness factors that promote and enable successful technology adoption. Research Design: The methods section outlines the two data collection phases, the Delphi method and the survey questionnaire. Both phases employed in the study are described along with the specific tactics to gather data for analysis. The sample included technology subject matter experts in community colleges across the U.S. The phase one, Delphi method, included between 17-20 respondents, while the phase two, online survey, included 182 respondents. The methods included both qualitative and quantitative approaches, but primarily quantitative in the form of descriptive analyses, factor analyses, and multiple regression. Findings: This study showed what technology readiness characteristics are most important in allowing community colleges to achieve their strategic and student-success initiatives. The findings also pointed out the disconnect between people’s technology expectations and their community college’s ability to provide and deliver what is wanted and needed. Additionally, the paper outlined the constraints and hindrances impacting technology readiness, and the benefits of evaluating a college’s readiness prior to technology integration and adoption. The findings demonstrated the relationship between the factors of technology readiness and adoption and technologists’ self-ratings of their college’s readiness to implement technology. Lastly, this paper identified the significance and implications of this type of study to the community college body of knowledge. Conclusion: The overall conclusion of this study indicated the community college organization is insufficiently preparing its people and systems for technology adoption. The resultant technology readiness and assessment instrument was developed based on the findings of the study and includes the key components for successful technology deployment. Areas such as employee and end user training, executive level support, communication, awareness, sufficient funding, accessibility and access, project management, and ongoing technical support were consistent themes in the data. Respondents indicated a significant gap in the expectations of what a technology should do and the ability of the organization to actually do what is necessary to prepare to adopt the technology. Future research is warranted to test the instrument within community colleges as well as exploration of people versus organizational change management.
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  • Pending Publication
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  • 2020-05-26 to 2022-06-27

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