United States Distance Learning Association

lab assistant’s room beside the classroom
and can see the students
through a window.
Before the face-to-face session, instructional
materials and Live Classroom procedures
were uploaded in the WebCT course
for the students (see Appendix A). Procedural
checklists were distributed to the faculty
(see Appendix B). CLTT Developers
and technical help were available to be
with the students and the instructor for
these face-to-face sessions.
Both instructors ran two face-to-face
sessions. Following that, the senior faculty
member felt competent to run her class virtually
off-site. The other faculty member
continued to meet with her class face-toface
and used Live Classroom to bring in
the foreign student.
It was hoped that these two faculty
members could be influential in the diffusion
process for this technology. They did a
presentation of their experiences in a luncheon
forum for 40 faculty and continue to
use the platform themselves. In addition,
CLTT delivers a 6-week online training session
for faculty who are going to teach
fully online and Live Classroom is incorporated
into this course. Over 50 faculty have
completed the course over the past year.
Despite the presentation and the online
training, only five faculty members have
adopted Live Classroom over the course of
the year. Three of the faculty use it for fully
online courses and two faculty members
use it for recording and archiving their
face-to-face sessions. A more systematic
approach using diffusion theory may have
contributed to a faster rate of adoption
among faculty at the university.
an innovation, communication channels,
time, and a social system.
INNOVATION
According to Rogers (1995) the rate of
adoption of an innovation is based upon
the perceived characteristics of the innovation.
In other words, the innovation could
be beneficial, but if it is not perceived as
such, will not be adopted. These characteristics
are categorized as relative advantage,
compatibility, complexity, trialability, and
observability.
RELATIVE ADVANTAGE
For the two faculty members in this
pilot, the relative advantage of using this
technology was to connect an international
student to their face-to-face group. The
senior faculty member realized that this
would also benefit her students as they
were working full-time jobs and they
would appreciate not having to come onsite
to classes. She was receptive to the idea
of having regularly scheduled virtual
evening classes.
The junior faculty member was not
ready to take that step and she felt more
comfortable in the face-to-face environment.
She said “This was my first time
teaching a graduate class and I did not
want to abandon my students.” She felt
that there was a disadvantage to her students
in doing these virtual sessions. Interestingly
she did move to a fully online
environment the next semester. This might
be the result of her own comfort level and
her realization that she could still interact
with her students and was not in any way
abandoning them.
DIFFUSION THEORY
Rogers (1976) defines diffusion as “the process
in which an innovation is communicated
through certain channels over time
among members of a social system” (p. 5).
The concept contains four main elements:
COMPATIBILITY
Rogers (1995) defines compatibility as
the perception of the innovation in relation
to existing values, experiences, and needs
of the potential adopters. In the case of the
junior faculty member, she recalled her
50 Distance Learning Volume 4, Issue 4