E-Teaching in Undergraduate University Education and Its Relationship to Approaches to Teaching

While researchers working within the Student Learning Research framework have developed or adapted questionnaires to gather information on students’ experiences of blended learning, no questionnaire has been developed to enquire about teachers’ experiences in such learning environments. The present article reports the development and testing of a novel questionnaire on ‘approaches to e-teaching’, which may be employed to investigate the experience of teaching when e-learning is involved. Results showed suitable reliability and validity. Also, when exploring associations between the novel questionnaire scales and those of the well-known ‘approaches to teaching’ inventory (Prosser and Trigwell, 2006), results from correlation and cluster analyses suggest that student-focused approaches to teaching are needed for significant use of digital technology to emerge. For practice, this relevant outcome implies that teaching needs to be considered holistically when supporting teachers to incorporate e-learning in their practice: because it seems they approach online teaching coherently with the face-to-face side of the blended experience.