Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

The critical role of faculty : applied frameworks and strategies for integrating distance education in postsecondary institutions

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  • This thesis asserts that faculty are the critical resource for the integration of distance education by postsecondary institutions. The major barriers to the participation and adoption of distance education center around faculty. This manuscript thesis incorporates a series of articles to develop applied frameworks and strategies that place faculty at the core of the institutional adoption process. An advocacy approach that integrates organizational culture and diffusion of innovation theories provides a conceptual framework for addressing the complex issues inducing faculty resistance to distance teaching. What issues impact faculty receptivity to distance teaching? At the institutional level, altered faculty roles for distance teaching, academic quality, inload vs overload teaching assignments, promotion and tenure, quality of instructional and student support services, and traditionally embedded academic norms affect faculty receptivity to distance teaching. Moreover, this thesis asserts that institutional and interinstitutional extended degree programs utilizing telecommunications must resolve issues related to curricular approval, accreditation, program prioritization, academic residency, fee structures, and articulation. Integrated instructional delivery frameworks are presented that fuse traditional instructional systems with new learning systems. These frameworks advocate the gradual integration of telecommunications-based coursework in extended degree programs to promote greater faculty participation, expand curricular offerings for students, and balance the introduction of new learning systems with traditional campus-based systems. A faculty support model for integrating distance education in postsecondary institutions delineates the key organizations and professionals essential to faculty and institutional adoption. This model asserts that the centrality of faculty to distance teaching adoption requires mutual support from presidents, deans, departmental chairpersons, the faculty senate, media services, and continuing education. In conclusion, distance education compels postsecondary institutions to reduce existing barriers to faculty participation by compensating, rewarding and training faculty at levels commensurate with traditional instructional activities and to provide instructional and administrative support services designed to ensure student access to high quality programs. Without well trained and equitably rewarded distance teaching faculty, the potential of distance education will be seriously diminished. Within the mainstream academic culture, failure to ameliorate these human resource needs reduces faculty receptivity to, and participation in, postsecondary distance teaching. Institutions that satisfy these needs will simultaneously create a balanced equilibrium between the application of advanced technologies and human resource development necessary for ensuring instructional quality and student access to extended educational programs delivered via distance education.
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