Adopting Web Conferencing in Online Teaching

Abstract

This study represented dimensions from the Diffusion of Innovations theory and the Community of Inquiry model to explore the adoption of web-conferencing. It used logistic regression to model the likelihood of adopting web-conferencing in online teaching with data collected from 66 college online instructors. In the logistic regression analyses, measures of the instructors’ perception of the instructional benefits of web-conferencing, perception of web-conferencing as a tool for creating social presence and teaching presence, and perception of barriers of using web-conferencing in online instruction were the independent variables, and the binary dependent variable represented the instructors’ adoption or non-adoption of the web-conferencing innovation. The results of the full logistic regression model (with all three independent variables) and the reduced models (with one or two independent variables at a time) are reported and implications for promoting web-conferencing adoption and future research are discussed.