This interpretive critical inquiry was aimed at coming to understand the
experiences of faculty at research universities who teach using educational technology in
the present academic capitalism era, and how these experiences affect their job
satisfaction. The study was carried out in the South Central region of the US at two
research universities—University A and University B—of one university system.
Purposive sampling was used to select 10 tenured faculty members as study
participants. The data collection included ethnographic interviews, participant
observations, and document analyses and occurred over an 8-month period between
April and December 2007. The interviews were audio recorded, transcribed, and
analyzed using Lincoln and Guba’s (1985) approach to content analysis.
Based on the themes and subthemes that emerged, the experiences of teaching
using educational technology seemed to yield positive end results that served as
rationales. However, the participants did experience obstacles such as time constraints, steep learning curves, technical problems, and various pedagogical challenges. Those
who seemed least burdened appeared to be those with the most departmental support.
The participants’ experiences portrayed the professorship in the research
university as an independent and autonomous position with a heavy work load and
constant juggling of different tasks. The path to successful promotion and tenure
appeared to be clearly marked by guidelines that require research productivity through
external funds, an instance of academic capitalism. Teaching appeared to be secondary
or tertiary in importance. Conflicts seemed to exist between the faculty and
administrators in the utilities of teaching using educational technologies in terms of
mismatched rationales or motivations, and therefore, mismatched outcome expectations.
The majority of the participants appeared to be very satisfied with their jobs.
Even so, all ten stated they had turnover intentions to leave University A or B at one
point or another in the past, although perhaps not the professoriate. Many said teaching
using educational technology was personally satisfying. The conclusion includes
implications to students, faculty, research universities, and HRD; recommendations for
future research; and three working hypotheses.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2712 |
| Date | 15 May 2009 |
| Creators | Demps, Elaine Linell |
| Contributors | Lincoln, Yvonna S., Lynham, Susan A. |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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