Challenges in Integrating Technology into Education

TL;DR

This study investigates perceived obstacles to technology integration in Turkish education, highlighting training, content support, incentives, and infrastructure as key barriers, with no significant influence from demographic factors.

Contribution

It identifies specific perceived obstacles to technology integration in education and examines their associations with personal and professional differences among experts.

Findings

Training and content support are major obstacles.

Infrastructure inadequacy hinders technology use.

No significant demographic influence on perceived obstacles.

Abstract

Despite significant amount of investment, there seems to be obstacles to technology integration in education. In order to shed light on the nature of perceived obstacles to technology integration, opinions of 117 professionals, who were selected by Turkish Ministry of National Education as experts in their respective fields, about the obstacles to integration of technology into education were investigated. After categorizing the perceived obstacles by factor analysis, associations of those categories with personal and professional differences were further investigated for better contextualizing the findings. Correlations were analyzed by Pearson's product moment coefficient and point-biserial coefficient. The results revealed that it's not the hardware itself that constitute obstacles to technology integration. Insufficiency of in-service and pre-service training, content support, and incentive system emerged as major perceived obstacles to technology integration. Inadequacy of physical and technological infrastructure was also found to be an important obstacle to successful integration. Novelty of the technologies compared to older ones were not found to be an obstacle to technology integration. Moreover, participants stressed the lack of education in teacher training institutions about current technologies that Ministry of National Education officially requires teachers to use as part of their jobs to be another important obstacle. There were no correlations between sex, age, level of education, job position, year of experience in other careers, and any of the categories of perceived obstacles. However, there was a strong negative correlation between year of experience in teaching and insufficiency of resources. Association between year of experience in educational administration and negative psychological state was also strong and negative.