0.4 Discussion  (Page 10/23)

Another difference between the college and K-12 environment was that the school facilitator was usually the school principal, who tells the teachers to adopt the innovation. In this study, the college instructors all voluntarily adopted, with the possible exception of Laura, who was encouraged to adopt by her supervisor. For the rest, the Intellipro staff or the telephone assistant could have served as facilitator, but half did not contact either of them.

The Level 6 instructors, Mark and Carrie, did not move through the categories in a linear way. Carrie was not able to move into Level 4b (Refinement; changing innovation to be more student- centered) or Level 5 (Integration; collaborating with other teachers to benefit students), because the instructional technologist informed her that she had to use Web CT as the course management system, and simply embed the link to Online Day within it. This actually caused the course to become less student centered, because it added extra navigational layers for the students to negotiate. The same situation evolved with Ed when he was preparing to teach with the Online Day resources the fourth time.

It became clear that the linear model of CBAM did not fit with college level instructors who had more autonomy and possessed varying levels of technology experience, which was also questioned in a review of CBAM literature ( Anderson, 1997 ). My conclusion resonates with a study that found CBAM inadequate to fit a more complex environment ( Vandenberghe, 1983 ).

Use of online day components

In order to have a clearer understanding of the participant’s level of technology use, Figure 8 was constructed to show the most frequently used components of the Online Day website. The categories refer to the actions taken by the instructors to implement the various components: customized course website, posted syllabus; created weekly quiz from test bank; assigned online videos; posted weekly discussion board topic; posted comments on the discussion board; received assignments online, and supplemented with other technologies.

The most frequently cited reason the participants gave for adopting the online version of the course materials was to give students access to the case videos. However, the most universally adopted online component was the test bank for creating chapter quizzes. In this section I will discuss the components used and the reasons why the instructors chose to use some components and not others. In addition to the components most frequently used from the Online Day website, a category has been appended to indicate that instructors supplemented the technology offered on the website with other technologies. For example, some instructors brought departmental videos to the class, they assigned the students to listen to online podcasts, and one instructor even assigned students to collaborate in small groups to create case videos that were shown in class.

By indicating which components were used under each instructor’s name, the chart reflects the amount and variety of technology used in their teaching. The data from this chart will be combined with other data on each instructor to create a composite view of how they taught. The collective data adds to our knowledge of which parts of Online Day were able to be integrated with the instructors’ teaching.