Faculty Perceptions of Organizational Changes due to Online Education at Traditional Four-Year Higher Education Institutions

Abstract

As online education continues to grow in the United States, few studies have investigated how faculty members perceive their instructional roles and their organizations to be changing as a result. This qualitative study is based on interviews with twenty-two faculty members from public and private non-profit institutions across the United States, and found that faculty members perceived the course design process, interactions with their students, and their own approach to teaching all changed substantially in the online context, typically in ways that inclined them to see these efforts as higher quality than their on ground teaching endeavors. Despite this, faculty members did not perceive that their departments or their institutions changed very much as a result of online education, and determined that institutional motivations for online education were consistent with typical market-aligned non-profit approaches to higher education in the United States (e.g., based on competition, student demand, and expanding institutional reach). Moreover, this market-aligned inclination identified by faculty members aligns well with Slaughter and Rhoades’ (2004) theory of academic capitalism.