Carol Oliver

Teaching at a Distance: the Online Faculty Work Environment Carol Oliver

This book critically examines the everyday work experiences of college professors who teach online. This research focuses on their work responsibilities as online faculty within the larger university system and the workplace issues that affect them both in and outside the classroom. Environment behavior studies and socio-technical approaches represent the theoretical frameworks used to interpret the results of this qualitative study. Online professors reported that teaching online transformed the way they teach and led them to pedagogically re-conceptualize their work in the online and face-to-face-classroom. The professors admitted needing time management strategies for coping with longer hours of work when teaching in the online classroom and indicating that the online class size was too large. The results in this book are discussed using spatial themes to describe distance learning environments and faculty workplace issues. This book will be especially useful to designers of educational technology and schools, college professors interested in teaching online and university administrators.