“This study revealed a number of barriers to adoption of technology … We were surprised that even faculty with high levels of proficiency generally identified the same barriers as faculty with low levels of proficiency. In the following sections we describe each of the major barriers along with recommendations for reducing them.
From a faculty perspective, the biggest problem with using technology for teaching is reliability. Unreliability was the most commonly cited “significant problem,” the problem most often addressed by faculty who offered solutions to correct problems, and the most commonly cited factor in whether faculty will adopt a technology. Table 3 shows the means and standard deviations for factors affecting the adoption of technology, including unreliability. The factors come directly from the questionnaire.
Several other problems described by faculty seem closely akin to unreliability: software incompatible with office and home, mistakes by support services, software malfunctions, burned out light bulbs, slow Internet access, and out-of-date software….
Learning to Use New Technologies
The second biggest concern reported by faculty was the time it takes to learn to use new technologies. Several other problems are associated: portable carts used to bring technology to some classrooms are hard to use; classrooms are too different, so faculty learning doesnÂ’t generalize; and faculty do not know where to get the training they need….
Recommendations for New Technologies.
To support faculty in learning new technologies, consider the following recommendations.
–Have faculty with different levels of proficiency test new classroom technology setups before implementing them in other classrooms. Such testing can assure that the systems are easy for faculty to learn. On many campuses, some faculty like to experiment with the way they teach. These faculty must have opportunities to reveal problems and get them corrected before the technologies move into regular use.
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More of this EDUCAUSE Quarterly article at http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eqm0223.pdf