Perceptions of innovative culture for online and e-learning innovation in higher education

For-profit universities have been teaching student's over the Internet since the 1990s. Traditional campus-based universities are slowly adopting online and e-learning technologies. Sparse literature exists on the innovative culture in higher education. A true gap exists with regard to how the faculty of higher education institutions who have implemented online and e-learning technology perceive the culture. The purpose of the quantitative descriptive study was to identify the differences in the perceptions of administrators and tenured faculty regarding innovative culture as measured by the seven-factor model for adopting online and e-learning technologies in the traditional campus-based institutions in the United States. The study introduced a new innovative culture survey to higher education. Using the seven-factor model developed by Brooke Dobni, the seven-point Likert-type scale enabled me to investigate the factors most influencing the innovative culture of administrators and tenured faculty in 4-year public institutions in the State University of New York (SUNY) system and the California State University (CSU) system. The study results supported three of the five alternate hypotheses. Based on the respondents of the survey, the difference of innovative culture factors between administrators and tenured faculty who have successfully implemented online and e-learning in this study were employee creativity and empowerment, organizational constituency, and preimplementation context. The results provided a foundation for future research seeking to identify the innovative culture factors of organizations.