An Examination of Factors that Affect Community College Faculty's Use of Technology for Teaching: A Comparison of Full-Time and Part-Time Faculty

Abstract

While the literature indicates that community colleges continue to increase their use of part-time faculty and that they are taking a leading role in utilizing technology for instructional purposes, it has also been reported that part-time faculty are less likely than their full-time counterparts to use course-specific web sites and e-mail for instructional purposes, and that they are less likely to teach non-face-to-face classes (U.S. Department of Education, 2002). For the community college to be successful in its expanding role in the use of technology, it must do everything it can to promote technology use by faculty, both full-time and part-time. This study was designed to examine the ability of selected intrinsic motivating factors, extrinsic motivating factors, personal and professional characteristics and institutional characteristics to predict faculty use of technology and distance education teaching. This research used a cross-sectional correlational design utilizing secondary analysis of the 1999 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF:99) dataset.

Logistic Regression was employed in the analysis and it was determined that student-faculty ratio, satisfaction with compensation, use of institutional funds for instructional training and teaching an occupational course positively affect the odds of a community college faculty member teaching a distance education course. The results also showed that satisfaction with autonomy and being male positively affect the odds of a faculty member using the web for instructional purposes while satisfaction with compensation and being a part-time faculty member negatively affected the odds. When examining full-time community college faculty individually, the use of institutional funds for training and not being a member of a union negatively affected the odds of using the web and satisfaction with autonomy positively affected it. For part-time community college faculty the only factor found to affect the use of the web for instructional purposes was an increase in satisfaction with autonomy. Chi-Square analysis determined that the full-time faculty group was significantly more likely to have access to the internet.