Publication Date

2018

Document Type

Dissertation/Thesis

First Advisor

Hung, Wei-Chen

Degree Name

Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy)

Legacy Department

Department of Educational Technology, Research and Assessment

LCSH

Educational technology; Higher education; Adult education

Abstract

While people outside of the profession may see online teaching as a randomly constructed field, the development of distance learning in higher education settings has grown rapidly over the past ten years due to the massive development of technology (Batts, Pagliari, Mallett & McFadden, 2010; McQuggan, 2012). According to Villegas-Reimers (2003), professional development can be summarized as, "the development of a person in his or her professional role" (p. 11). The problem of motivating and engaging faculty members who are enrolled in online professional development among the university training programs remains a barrier. Motivating the faculty to participate, reiterate, and improve is a key factor that is required to encourage such online development not only in King Khalid University (KKU) but also in the entire higher education system in the Saudi Arabian. Therefore, the purpose of this case study was to investigate motivational factors in the online professional development environment among faculty at KKU in Saudi Arabia. The research questions were designed to seek data related to facultys' attention, relevance, confidence, satisfaction, and to predict their intention to teach online courses at KKU. A valid number of 119 participants responded to the survey, 57 (47.9 %) were male and 62 (52.1%) were female faculty. The overall findings of this study showed that there was a positive relationship between relevance and faculty intention to teach online courses. The remaining three factors of ARCS model consisting of attention, confidence, and satisfaction; were not found to be individually significant predictors of faculty intention. Findings also showed that motivation significantly and positively predicted faculty intention. For limitation, this study utilized a homogeneous sample as all the participants belonged to the same university, KKU, and the same country, and so they might have used traditional view of the superiority of in person classroom. More about recommendation and future studies are discussed in chapter 5.

Comments

Advisors: Wei-Chen Hung.||Committee members: Rebecca Hunt; Thomas Smith.||Includes illustrations.||Includes bibliographical references.

Extent

118 pages

Language

eng

Publisher

Northern Illinois University

Rights Statement

In Copyright

Rights Statement 2

NIU theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from Huskie Commons for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without the written permission of the authors.

Media Type

Text

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