The Impact of Web-based Instruction on Faculty in Higher Education Institutions: New Directions for Research
Elaine J. Labach

Abstract
Previous research conducted on web-based teaching technologies on faculty in higher educational institutions has focused on faculty attitudes, roles, skills and adoption issue for adding to the literature. This paper contributes to the analysis of web-based technologies by presenting a five-year literature review of 39 journal articles published between 2006 and 2010 in 25 journals. This paper focuses specifically on academic faculty at higher educational institutions and analyzes literature on the basis of data collection methods used, countries and Internet technologies studied, and the research objective of each article. This analysis revealed a number of limitations in the existing literature such as the tendency: to conduct one-time (vs. temporal) studies; to repeat adoption factor studies; to treat web-based technologies and faculty as homogenous in understanding adoption; and to focus on a small population of faculty without considering the interactions of faculty across universities and/or between countries. These limitations highlight the need for moving beyond identifying and evaluating adoption factors into new research directions. This paper concludes by identifying a number of broad research questions areas which might help overcome the limitations of the existing body of research.


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