Faculty perceptions and pedagogical philosophy: A case study of instructional technology in higher education

The overall purpose of this study was to examine college faculty perceptions have about instructional technology and to determine whether or not a relationship exists between these perceptions and an instructor's pedagogical philosophy. While the primary research questions served as a framework, eight subsequent questions were constructed to help inform the perspective used to explore and study instructional technology. The answers to these questions helped form a deeper understanding and context needed to fully address the study's research questions. Full-time faculty members in the district-wide English of a large open-admissions community college in Missouri served as the population. This is especially important given the conflicting results presented in the research literature about the effectiveness of instructional technology. A mixed-methods approach was used for this study, and an online survey consisting of open-ended and close-ended was used to collect the data. A content analysis strategy was used when examining the data so that the researcher could categorize the qualitative data into clusters of similar themes as well as produce frequencies of categories associated with the quantitative data. When analyzing the data, the overall trend that was noticed was that there is not a direct connection between an instructor's pedagogical philosophy and the success with using technology. While a relationship does exist between pedagogical philosophy and the perceptions about instructional technology, it is not as clearly defined as the research literature may indicate.