Engineering College Lecturers Reluctance to Adopt Online Courses

The paper investigates difficulties involved in integrating online courses in academic colleges. Despite their growing prevalence in Israel and worldwide there are still no online courses offered as part of the learning process in many colleges. In order to identify factors for this phenomenon, a study was conducted to investigate the attitudes of 137 lecturers in an academic college concerning online courses. A questionnaire was employed to examine attitudes in four areas: cognizance of the online courses, willingness to teach these courses, influence of online courses on the college’s reputation and teaching methods in online courses. The study identified four sources of reluctance among college instructors to teach in these courses: lack of knowledge concerning teaching methods, fear of a heavy work burden, concern that students’ achievements might fall and impairment of the college’s reputation. Since there is desire to integrate online courses in academic colleges, it is recommended that an online pedagogy support centre should be opened in these colleges, and that colleges should consider making it mandatory for students to take at least one compulsory online course during their degree course.