Understanding the faculty experience of teaching using educational technology in the academic capitalism era: an interpretive critical inquiry

This interpretive critical inquiry was aimed at coming to understand the experiences of faculty at research universities who teach using educational technology in the present academic capitalism era, and how these experiences affect their job satisfaction. The study was carried out in the South Central region of the US at two research universities?University A and University B?of one university system. Purposive sampling was used to select 10 tenured faculty members as study participants. The data collection included ethnographic interviews, participant observations, and document analyses and occurred over an 8-month period between April and December 2007. The interviews were audio recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using Lincoln and Guba?s (1985) approach to content analysis. Based on the themes and subthemes that emerged, the experiences of teaching using educational technology seemed to yield positive end results that served as rationales. However, the participants did experience obstacles such as time constraints, steep learning curves, technical problems, and various pedagogical challenges. Those who seemed least burdened appeared to be those with the most departmental support. The participants? experiences portrayed the professorship in the research university as an independent and autonomous position with a heavy work load and constant juggling of different tasks. The path to successful promotion and tenure appeared to be clearly marked by guidelines that require research productivity through external funds, an instance of academic capitalism. Teaching appeared to be secondary or tertiary in importance. Conflicts seemed to exist between the faculty and administrators in the utilities of teaching using educational technologies in terms of mismatched rationales or motivations, and therefore, mismatched outcome expectations. The majority of the participants appeared to be very satisfied with their jobs. Even so, all ten stated they had turnover intentions to leave University A or B at one point or another in the past, although perhaps not the professoriate. Many said teaching using educational technology was personally satisfying. The conclusion includes implications to students, faculty, research universities, and HRD; recommendations for future research; and three working hypotheses.