Concerns and Preferences of Teachers towards the Development of Virtual Classroom in Hong Kong

  • Authors:
  • Siu Keung Lam;Percy Lai Yin Kwok

  • Affiliations:
  • Chinese University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong, China);Chinese University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong, China)

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2005 conference on Towards Sustainable and Scalable Educational Innovations Informed by the Learning Sciences: Sharing Good Practices of Research, Experimentation and Innovation
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

The study investigates the development of virtual classroom in secondary schools in Hong Kong from in-service teacher perspectives and focuses on teachers' concerns towards the virtual classroom and their preferences on designing virtual classroom. Quantitative survey data came from 352 secondary school teachers and qualitative interview data was collected from 8 of the surveyed teachers. The results indicated that major concerns of most studied teachers were lower stages of typical non-user concerns profile, implying that virtual classroom was still at the infancy stage of development in some secondary schools of Hong Kong during the research period. A minority of teachers, who exhibited high competency in information literacy and were competent users of virtual classroom, had their concerns profiles shifted to higher stages of concern. An analysis of teachers' paradigm for the use of virtual classroom revealed that most teachers still stuck to the traditional teacher-centered pedagogy and employed mainly receptive and directive architecture in teaching without using virtual classroom in guided discovery and exploratory approaches. Strategic plan and staff development program for the success of implementation of virtual classroom are finally discussed in this paper.