Why offline? It's very personal

“Desire to protect status and student contact fuels resistance to e-learning. Rebecca Attwood writes.

Academics are resistant to e-learning because they feel it threatens their identity as tutors and because they want to protect face-to-face teaching relationships, a study has found.

Janet Hanson, head of education enhancement at Bournemouth University, conducted a group interview with nine academics and in-depth individual interviews with a further five at a university in the south of England.

She found that when academics saw that their students’ technological expertise exceeded their own, their identities as “expert knowledge providers” was undermined.

In such cases, academics perceive a shift in the balance of power between themselves and their students, Dr Hanson writes, losing their role as the “gatekeepers” of knowledge.”

Read entire article from Times Higher Education.