Overcoming Resistance to Networked Learning and Teaching Modalities—A Longitudinal Comparison of Changing Teaching Staff Attitudes Towards Learning Technologies
Keywords:
Teaching staff attitudes, Computers, ICT, Learning and teaching, Teaching staffAbstract
This article considers a comparison of questionnaire survey results from teaching staff in the 1998 Department of Pharmacy teaching staff cohort with the same School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences cohort four years later (2002) at the University of Brighton. The effective- ness of solutions—proposed in previous work—seeking to overcome staff resistance to using computer-based learning and teaching methods is evaluated. It is reported that all staff now use e-mail, with half regularly doing so to communicate with or in response to communication from students. There is a shift to staff using more Computer Aided Learning (CAL) packages in their teaching, with a much wider range of teaching media in use.
Conclusions are drawn that identified an increased awareness among staff as to what computer-based learning and teaching methods can do and how they can be integrated into existing teaching. A move away from technical and hardware barriers towards more pedagogical issues of learning technology use is identified. Suggestions, such as increased one-to-one support and training and good-practice dissemination, are proposed to enable the school to achieve its aim of allowing all staff to make appropriate choices regarding the use of learning technologies within their teaching.
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