Overview of Instructional Technology Used in the Education of Occupational Therapy Students: A Survey Study

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore the type of instructional technology (IT) master's degree level occupational therapy educational programs routinely use as a part of their lecture-and laboratory-based instruction. Surveying the administrators of 121 graduate occupational therapy programs in the United States, we found that the majority of the respondents identified their program as using IT in some form for lecture-based courses, with less inclusion of IT for laboratory-based courses. Hybrid instruction, with the majority of the content being delivered face-to-face and the remainder via online, were the trends among the respondents. The findings also indicated that the respondents' programs avoid certain IT, including synchronous online chat rooms or instant messaging, digital image collections, blogs or online journaling, Wikis, and audio/video podcasting. Few of the respondents said their programs had made a significant leap into implementing a larger online presence with instructional technology. In a broader perspective, e-learning has been defined as "an Internet-or intranet-based and webdelivered teaching-learning system with or without face-to-face contact between the teacher and the learner" (Panda & Mishra, 2007, p. 326 Madill, 2006;Jahng, Krug, & Zhang, 2007;Williams, 2006). This lack of impact may be due, sent an email to request participation in the survey. KeywordsThe invitations included a brief description of the study and a link to the survey on SurveyMonkey®.A reminder email was sent out to participants 15 days after the invitation to participate. The survey closed after 30 days. ResultsOf the 121 MOT programs and/or their program administrators who were solicited to take part in the study, 48 responded and completed the informed consent form. Of those 48 respondents, 27 completed each question on the survey, resulting in a 22% overall response rate.Nearly all of the MOT program contacts and/or administrators who responded to all of the questions (N = 27) reported using some degree of online instructional materials. In addition, the respondents indicated that over the past 2 years, the majority of lecture-based courses remained face-toface while being supplemented by some level of online interaction. As noted in Table 1, while many of the programs are not completely online (i.e., no face-to-face interaction), they are shifting toward the inclusion of completely online courses and/or are redesigning courses to reduce face-to-face interaction and increase online interaction. This shift toward the inclusion of technology also carries over to those courses that are considered lab-based, with the majority of the respondents indicating that the majority of lab-based courses are now face-to-face instruction supplemented by online interaction. However, the data notes that there is less of a shift toward using e-learning IT in the lab-based classes. The specific percentages are noted in Table 2. Beyond simply looking at the number of courses taught that included IT, it is important to l...

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