Research Team- Technology Focus

Research Team with a Technology Focus

Several multi-disciplinary research teams were launched last fall in order to promote collaborate research and increase the research activities available to RHCHP faculty. The focus of the teams varied but addressed themes such as delivery methods, learning methods and the use of technology to achieve learning outcomes.

All teams are well on their way and are in various stages of the research process. The Technology Research Team comprised of Barbara Berg, Deb Bennett-Woods, Margaret Mulhall, Kathleen Whalen, Nicole Marcisz, Traci Snedden, Lisa Zenoni, Karen LeDuc and Lora Claywell is chaired by Sheila Carlon with Tim Noteboom as the research consultant.

The team sought to replicate a previous study conducted on business students in an online environment that surveyed the student’s perceptions of “presence” in online classes. Using the Community Of Inquiry instrument first used by Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2000) the survey measures students perceptions of teaching, cognitive and social presence since learning occurs as a function of the interaction of these three elements within a community of students and faculty.

Our team also sought to validate the instrument on students enrolled in health professions programs since the instrument was previously tested on business students. We also wanted to see if there were any statistically significant differences between these two samples. Since our sample included students from three academic programs – Physical Therapy, Nursing and HSA, we were also interested in any differences between these student populations and their perceptions of these three constructs. Initially we also thought there might be differences in their perceptions simple due to their differences in ages (our students were older than the business students in the earlier study) and because we had a significant number of graduate students in our population.

The tests used were the same as in the original study (factor analysis, factor analysis with oblimin rotation, Eigen values were obtained) and a scree plot was analyzed for comparison to the original study.

While the results have not been analyzed in detail, there were not too many differences. We did, however, validate the instrument on the health care discipline students even though the original study’s factor analysis loaded into the three dimensions a little differently than ours did. Two questions from our study loaded into different presence factors than the original study.

We will disseminate these results after more analysis and hope to use the results to inform future course design around the areas of “presence” in the online classes. This study has also been accepted for an E-Poster presentation at the Madison Conference for Online Teaching and Learning in August of this year.


Dr. Sheila Carlon