Stalled Innovation: Examining the technological, pedagogical and content knowledge of Australian university educators (A Summary)

The paper entitled Stalled Innovation: Examining the technological, pedagogical and content knowledge of Australian university educators was written by Karin Barac, Sarah Prestridge, and Katherine Main who had an affiliation with Griffith University, Australia. The paper was published in Australian Educational Computing in 2017 Vol 32(1).

Introduction
Some people argued that there is still little evidence to support claims for widespread renewal of this magnitude in the daily business of higher education (Oliver, 2012; Price&Kirkwood, 2014; Russell, Malfroy, Gosper&McKenzie, 2014; Selwyn, 2014). These studies suggest that the introduction of technologies alone will do little to transform education if it is not linked to pedagogies.

The purpose of the study was to explore the nexus between pedagogy and technology in higher education, especially how technology is being used in specific relationship to the content and whether pedagogy is being shaped by the technology. The paper used the TPACK framework from Mishra and Koehler (2006). 

Methodology

The goal of the research was to understand how academics perceive the relationship between pedagogy and technology in contemporary Australian higher education. There were multifaceted approaches in the study and those were a combination of qualitative and quantitative.  The researchers used random sampling to get the sample in a larger project. To gather the data, the researchers used questionnaire which was supported by interviews and then triangulates. The instrument used in the research was developed and validated by Schmidy et al. (2009). The instrument was to develop to measure teachers' self-assessment of TPACK domains. The researchers changed some questions in the instrument because it is related to specific knowledge, for example, I have sufficient knowledge about mathematics and I have various ways and strategies for developing my understanding of mathematics. The instrument also used 5 Likert scales. 

Participants

There were 219 respondents in this research, 63% among them were female and 74.4% were either lecturer or senior lecturer. Within ten discipline groups of university questions, the largest group were from health discipline (34.7%), business and commerce (12.8%), and education and criminology and law (10.5%). The median of the teaching experience range was ten years and an interquartile range from five to 17.5 years. Among the respondents, 799% of them had experience in teaching face-to-face, 44.3% mixed-mode, and 43% online.

Analysis

To analyze the data, the researchers used SPSS. While to identify the relationships between the domain of TPACK, they used Pearson's correlation. They used Cronbach's alpha values to calculate the internal reliability of the test. The alpha values from 0.810 to 0.918 within the table was accepted for internal consistency. From the data summary of descriptive statistics for subscales, it indicated that the academics had more confidence in their CK than their PK or TK.

Respondents were all agree that learn technology easily but were least likely to agree that they know alot about a lot of technologies. The result in TK was in contrast with CK because there was a tendency towards agreeing and strongly agree with the respondents. But there was less agreement in using a variety of teaching approaches which was not surprising seeing that academics are rarely trained in teaching rather, their pedagogies tend towards how they were taught or what they have experienced. 

The data also showed that there was a stronger link between making pedagogy and content choices than between technology and content choices. And related to technology used in the classroom, the respondents showed that 93% of them used PowerPoint or Prezi and 14% of them used multimedia creation software or web platforms. When interrelated among the components, all components (technical skills, pedagogical skills, TPACK components and TPACK summary) were significantly positively correlated. The result of the research indicated that academics are not able to make connections between their content and applications of technologies of an understanding of the relationship between these two items and therefore do not have an integrated view of their teaching.

Overall from the gathered data, it suggested that academics have stronger ideas around the content that they do about their pedagogy or their use of technology but there was little relationship between CK and the other integrated domains. It was surprising that correlation between domains that CK was the only domain that was not significantly related to the use of technology. The reason why academic viewed technologies as a separate and unknown entity to their teaching and learning practices were the current academic development programs for technology adoption still seem to largely concentrate on technical skills rather than pedagogic use was 

Further Directions

The implementation of TPACK was just the first step to provide the context and the survey was limited because it only captured the academic perceptions of their understanding and did not capture how they apply these concepts in their daily practice of designing and delivering their courses. This research represented the first phase of investigation and further phases are in progress that investigates the design and delivery practices within five courses by explaining the course artifacts, the experiences of the academic and students involved in the courses.