Development of the Readiness to Teach Online Scale

Despite the growing importance of online education, faculty acceptance has remained unchanged. Training programs developed for faculty to teach online have often focused on assessing their cognitive rather than affective and behavioral outcomes. The Readiness To Teach Online scale was developed as part of a multiphase mixed method research project to measure faculty perceptions and motivations toward teaching online. Items in the subcategory Teaching and Learning measured perceptions of technology and online teaching, and motivations regarding resources and other external factors. Items in the subcategories Social and Student Engagement, Faculty and Technology Support, Course Development and Instructional Design, and Evaluation and Assessment collected baseline data for current practices. The pilot study of this scale demonstrated strong internal consistency reliability estimates and support for validity, showing moderately to highly correlated significant relationships between faculty perceptions and motivation to teach online; both perception and motivation constructs were moderately to highly correlated with Social and Student Engagement