A preliminary study of the impact of online instruction on teachers' technology concerns

The lead investigator taught a graduate online course, ‘Research Methods in Education’, at a Midwestern state university in the United States in the fall semester of 2001. Twenty-three participants were recruited from those enrolled in an online section of that course. Participants were then asked to complete consent forms and demographic surveys. All participants were in-service teachers, and a majority were in their first or second year of graduate studies in education. This study involved a single-group, pretest-posttest design. Specifically, the participants were pretested to measure the initial state of learner characteristics before online instruction with the SoC Questionnaire in the first week face-to-face orientation in the fall semester of 2001. Subsequently, the participants were exposed to the online WebCT environment from the second week through to the final week. During the final week the participants were posttested online with the same instrument to measure the developmental state of those characteristics affected by online instruction over the semester. The mean differences on each of the seven scales in the SoC Questionnaire were statistically tested to determine whether there were any significant differences in the concerns instrument.