All too often faculty are asked to implement technology into their teaching without the knowledge necessary to use the technology effectively. Due to the evolution of technology in everyday settings, students have come to expect to be engaged through technological means. This often creates undue stress on faculty members. The purpose of this study is to investigate technology integration by exploring the relationships between a faculty member’s technology preferences and educational beliefs. Through a mixed method, this study attempts to address the question of why faculty use the types of technology they do. More importantly, this study investigates if a faculty member’s educational beliefs have any influence on the technology they choose to use. Thirty-two medical, clinical, and healthcare faculty members participated in the study. They responded to a Teaching Perspectives Inventory (TPI) survey and a Technology Preferences survey with open-ended questions. Data analysis revealed multiple statistically significant findings between different beliefs and different types of technology. The results indicated that personal epistemic beliefs influence the types of technology faculty use. The technology choices faculty make are largely related to tools they are comfortable with and ones they believe effectively fit their teaching materials. The study also found statistically significant differences between age, gender, and reported technology use. It is suggested faculty development programs should consider faculty members’ educational beliefs and personal preferences when supporting faculty with their uses of technologies.

In 2005, the Lesotho Information and Communication Technology (ICT) policy introduction prescribed that all educational institutions for formal learning must play a major role in the improvement of teaching and learning mechanisms that develop a society that is ICT literate and capable of producing ICT products and services. This policy is part of the motivation for this study. The study's focus is to explore the extent to which ICT has been integrated in teaching and learning in one of the Lesotho higher education institutions. Its fundamental aim is to understand the ways in which the Lesotho College of Education (LCE) integrates ICT in teaching and learning environments. My study adopted the mixed method approach which based fact on an interpretive paradigm, with lecturer's interpretations regarding ICT integration in the college collected through structured questionnaires which were hand-distributed to purposefully selected lecturers as study participants. These questionnaires served as the basis and guide for face-to-face individual interviews of lecturers from the Computer studies and Agricultural/Environmental studies departments who were interviewed at their respective offices. Two sessions of sixty minutes, non-participatory observation of thirty computer studies students were also conducted. This study was guided by the activity theory/model based on the construction of real social change for pedagogy in a college. The concepts of the theory/model have been used to analyse the findings of this research. The findings of this study indicate that ICT integration creates opportunities in teaching and learning, where learning is focused on learners, and educators are only facilitators. Despite the opportunities that ICT has in learning, obstacles such as lecturers' lack of skills and incompetence in ICT literacy, limited resources and the infrastructure were found to be major factors hindering ICT integration in the college of education in Lesotho. The recommendations are that staff development and financial support should be considered a priority in ICT integration in this context. Also that ICT integration should include internal and external partners who can donate funds that will help in the implementation of ICT in teaching and learning at Lesotho's institutions of higher education. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009.

This research explored 19 higher education faculty members' perceptions of satisfaction with their online teaching work, identified elements that enhance or inhibit these higher education faculty members' online teaching satisfaction, and provided a theoretical framework, higher education faculty online teaching satisfaction a conceptual model, to understand the relationship among these elements. The study participants represented eight different university campuses, three academic disciplines, and 10 online programs. Data was collected from multiple sources including an online background questionnaire, semi-structured interviews, and public documents. Data was analyzed using the procedures for developing constructivist grounded theory proposed by Charmaz (2006). The researcher posits that the individual context component in this conceptual model affects, and is affected by the work context component as follows, online teaching work-related experiences are subjectively interpreted by individuals and groups of individuals, i.e., work-related perceptions, which affect, and are affected by individual(s) socially constructed and subjective interpretations of their online teaching work, i.e., individual(s) interpretations of work circumstances. The work-related perceptions and individual interpretations of the online teaching work circumstances reciprocally interact with each other, affecting and being affected by the first two components, individual context and work context, which also reciprocally interact and affect, and are affected by the faculty member(s) affective and cognitive evaluations of their online teaching work. These affective and cognitive evaluations result in a continuum of online teaching satisfaction. The resulting continuum of online teaching satisfaction can reciprocally affect, and be affected by any or all of the previously mentioned components of the conceptual model of this research.