COVID-19 forced all education online during Spring 2020 requiring face-to-face higher education faculty to immediately redesign their courses for an online modality. This dissertation studied faculty who used Canvas as their Learning Management System to investigate how faculty leveraged affordances and navigated constraints of the platform, specifically in Pages and Assignments, when they designed and redesigned their courses; how their pedagogical and Canvas training affected their choices; and the ways in which their experiences affected their workload and stress levels. This study employed a three-phase methodology: a) a Qualtrics survey with open and closed-ended questions; b) 11 faculty were interviewed; and, c) Canvas course sandboxes of the interviewees were observed via Zoom. The results indicate that although the majority of faculty had some kind of pedagogical or Canvas training prior to the pandemic, they felt extreme stress and higher workload during spring, but lower stress and workload during summer as they prepared for fall since they had more time to work. The majority of faculty worked nonstop throughout 2020, even during their Spring Breaks and summer vacations; they did so without additional pay while writing, designing, and redesigning courses, and only a few faculty were paid for additional summer training. The research was analyzed through a convergent framework of Critical Digital Pedagogy, Interface, and Affordance theories, which formed the Pandemic Teaching Cycle and development of a new educational affordance taxonomy.

This study investigated factors that predict Saudi Arabian faculty members' intentions to adopt and use Web 2.0 tools and to assess faculty's awareness of the educational benefits of Web 2.0 tools to supplement classroom instructions in higher education. One hundred and three faculty members (34 male and 69 female) from a large university in the Western region of Saudi Arabia participated in the web survey. The framework and model for explaining and predicting the contributing factors towards the decision to adopt and use of Web 2.0 tools was the Decomposed Theory of Planned Behavior (DTPB). The partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach was utilized to analyze data collected from the web survey. Results indicate that positive attitudes and perceived usefulness are significant predictors of Saudi Arabian faculty members' intentions to use Web 2.0 tools. Moreover, findings indicate that Saudi Arabian faculty members intend to use Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis, and social networking in their future classrooms to improve students' learning, student-student interaction, student-faculty interaction, and students' writing ability. Research implications for administrators and higher educational institutions indicate that professional development programs could be designed based on the significant predictors in the DTPB to support a successful integration of Web 2.0 tools in higher education.

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This exploratory and descriptive study examines research articles published in ten of the top journals in the broad area of educational technology during the last 20 years: 1) Educational Technology Research and Development (ETR&D); 2) Instructional Science; 3) Journal of the Learning Sciences; 4) TechTrends; 5) Educational Technology: The Magazine for Managers of Change in Education; 6) Journal of Educational Technology & Society; 7) Computers and Education; 8) British Journal of Educational Technology (BJET); 9) Journal of Educational Computing Research; and 10) Journal of Research on Technology in Education. To discover research trends in the articles published from 1995-2014, abstracts from all contributing articles published in those ten prominent journals were analyzed to extract a latent semantic space of broad research areas, top authors, and top-cited publications. Concepts that have emerged, grown, or diminished in the field were noted in order to identify the most dominant in the last two decades; and the most frequent contributors to each journal as well as those who contributed to more than one of the journals studied were identified.

<p> As school leaders continue to attempt to integrate technology into today&rsquo;s classrooms, 1:1 laptop initiatives are becoming increasingly more prevalent and certainly more affordable than ever before. School leaders must be able to justify the expenditure by the direct impact the integration of the laptops make on classroom instruction and learning. Preparing and supporting teachers to teach and facilitate learning with these new technological tools is a necessity that cannot be overlooked in ensuring the success of 1:1 laptop initiatives. This study examined the impact of various professional development preparatory factors on the instructional change that occurred immediately after implementation of a 1:1 laptop initiative within three high schools. Significant differences were observed between the teachers&rsquo; perceived value of different types of professional development activities, including learning to use hardware, software, content management and instructional delivery platforms, as well as learning to integrate technology into instruction. Significant changes were also observed in each of 11 different instructional activities when comparing teacher practice pre-1:1 laptop initiative implementation and during implementation. Correlations between the amount of time teachers had access to their own laptops prior to the 1:1 implementation and the change in frequency of use of the instructional activities indicated limited significant results, as did the correlations between the length of professional development preparation designed to prepare teachers for the 1:1 laptop initiative and the change in frequency of use of the 11 instructional activities. The final correlations between the teachers&rsquo; perceived value of the four professional development activities and the change in frequency of use of the 11 instructional activities also yielded limited significant results.</p>