Teachers, Those Who Are Teaching

¶ … teachers, those who are teaching online, to go back online during their off hours to check the status of their online courses and to answer emails in order to meet the demands of online students, has led Angela Perry to focus her dissertation on the study of online teachers. Perry, supported by her literature review, emphasized that the nature of online environment - its prominent characteristic as that of being available 24/7 - has led to the perception that online teachers are available 24/7 as well. This perception prevalent among online students leads to a forceful emotional pull among teachers to check and survey their courses during off hours. This compelling emotional pull was the focus of Perry's dissertation entitled, the Perception of Online Faculty as it Relates to Compelling Presence in the Online Environment. Perry saw the need to understand the online teaching field better so as to find ways in which to help prevent online teachers to feel burned out due to the compelling emotional pull they experience. Burnout among online teachers, Perry believes, will affect the overall instruction quality as well as the quality of learning process that are being offered by online institutions (Perry, 2008). Her argument is that burnout among online teachers lead to dissatisfaction; dissatisfied online teachers is inclined to have dissatisfied students which ultimately affects general online education.

Taking off from McLean's study on stress and job satisfaction among distance educators, Perry used McLean's study as a theoretical foundation for her dissertation. The purpose of her research was to identify the reasons why the online teachers return to the online environment after hours as well as to identify ways in which they can manage that tendency (Perry, 2008).

In order to achieve her goal of understanding the emotional pull that online teachers feel and finding ways to manage it, her dissertation focused on describing the compelling force that online teachers feel and understanding the ways in which this compelling force is being managed.

Perry wanted to find out in what ways the environment affects or leads online teachers to feel compelled to return to check their courses and how online teachers perceive the compelling feeling. She also wanted to understand the reasons why online teachers perceive a need to return to the online environment to check the status of their courses and in what ways do they cope and how they effectively manage their perceived need to return to the online environment (Perry, 2008). These research questions guided Perry in choosing the qualitative paradigm as the dissertation's research design. Due to the descriptive and explanatory nature of her interests, the case study method was chosen.

Perry explained in her dissertation that the descriptive case study method was chosen for her study because of its capability of gathering in-depth perceptions and observations to describe the environment and the compelling feeling that online teachers feel (Perry, 2008). Furthermore, her research questions dealt with the why's and the how's and perceptions, feelings, and desires were also included in her area of interest.

Among the scholars Perry cited are Yin and Merriam in expounding her reasons for choosing the case study as her methodology. Perry utilized Merriam's guidelines on the aspects of heuristic case study. These guidelines include explaining the reasons for the problem and the background of the situation, reasons why an innovation was successful or unsuccessful, discussing and evaluating that alternatives that were not chosen, and evaluating, summarizing, and concluding, which ultimately increases the case study's potential applicability.

The case that Perry decided to study was the undergraduate domestic teachers who have been teaching online at the University for a period of time. This was chosen based on convenience sampling. Perry reasoned out that this convenience sampling of the said university will increase the probability of having more support from the faculty and staff. The recruitment was done via email. The email included an explanation what the study was about and a short description of the researcher's main interest - the compelling emotional pull that the online teachers feel. Those who were qualified to join the research were invited to participate to an online survey in SurveyMonkey which consisted of open-ended questions. The respondents who participated in the research were considered as participants as observers of the case. All the descriptive data that Perry used in her study was gathered by the respondents. To beef up her data, Perry also used other sources of evidence in order to have multiple sources of evidence thereby making the study a high-quality case study. Other sources of evidence were, apart from the open-ended questions in the survey interview, documentation and instrumentation. Data analysis was done by identifying the unit of analysis and by explaining why the implementation failed. In order to undertake data analysis, Perry identified and described the compelling feeling online teachers feel, the environment, the observations as well as the perceptions of the online teachers, and the methods of managing the compelling emotional pull to return online after off hours in order to check the status of their courses.

While Perry chose the case study method for the design of her study, an interesting point of contention in Perry's dissertation is the use of open-ended survey questionnaire as a specific data gathering procedure. While Stake and Yin (as cited in Tellis, 1997) identified interview as one of the most important sources of evidence in case studies and that interview may take the form of a structured survey, Creswell (1994) didn't acknowledge survey as a qualitative data collection procedure. He defines survey as a design which provides quantitative or numeric description. Meanwhile, he articulated that interview is a qualitative data collection procedure and may take the form of face-to-face interview, telephone interview, and group interview.

In her dissertation, Perry included an explanation as to the reason why she resorted to online survey interview. She explained that it was due to the gatekeepers' denial of her request to interview the online teachers. However what the University administrators, the gatekeepers, allowed her was an online survey where the questions have been approved by them. It appears that this has greatly compromised the quality of her data. Creswell (1994) acknowledged that gaining entry to a research site as well as gaining approval of gatekeepers is important. However, it is this evaluator's stand that Perry could've looked for another case where the gatekeepers would've allowed her access to the respondents by allowing her to conduct interviews instead of surveys. Creswell (1994, p. 148) noted in his book that "gaining entry may be a continuous problem in a research project when the researcher moves from one site to another."