Alton L. Taylor

Identifying costs of instructional technology in higher education

Abstract The current advocacy for rapidly increasing the use of instructional technologies has not been accompanied by sufficient research on the costs of these modes of instruction. The purpose of this article is to illustrate the need for more comprehensive research on instructional technology costs and to provide a framework for examining these costs. First, to provide context, some current assumptions about the growing use of instructional technology are discussed. Then various categories of costs are described.

Predicting faculty interest in student advising in the community college

The primary purpose of this study was to identify any significant relationships between a measure of faculty interest in counseling activities (PAICT) and nine selected student advising experiences. The research setting was a community college of 12,047 students. A stratified, random sample of full-time faculty was selected to complete the PAICT measure, and a cluster random sample of their students were used to obtain self-reported experiences of the advising activities. Only 11% of the variance was accounted for between the faculty PAICT scores and the self-reported advising experiences of their students. There was 17% of the variance accounted for between faculty PAICT scores and eight personal characteristics of their students. The findings indicate that the faculty interest in advising does not affect the way students are advised.