An Experimental Study on College Teacher's Adoption of Instructional Technology

Instructional technology can make teachers do their jobs easier, better, faster and more effectively. Students can also benefit from its application. However, some college teachers do not adopt instructional technologies in their teaching as we expected. They like to teach the way they were taught as students before. Why and what factors really influence their adoption of instructional technology? This study offered a model suggestiong instructional technology adoption by college teachers depends on: the student, the teacher, the technology and the surroundings. An experiment was designed to verify the model. Samples were selected from teachers at a mid-sized university. Experimental data was collected by interviewing fifteen teachers (samples). Those interviewed represented five high-level users, five medium-level users, and five low-level users of instructional technology. Quantitative methods such as frequency counting were used to analyze and sort the data. Finally, conclusions can be drawn that different components in the model had different influential degree to the different levels of users of instructional technology.