Measuring institutional support for online and blended learning professional development: validating an instrument that examines teachers’ perceptions

ABSTRACT

Supporting teachers professionally, both in their teaching skills and the inclusion of technology, is one of the few direct interventions to help them grow. Currently, few instruments assessing these perceptions exist, and evidence on their validity is sparse. Hence, this paper presents the development and validation of an instrument assessing teachers’ perceived institutional support for online and blended learning professional development. A sample of 317 adult education teachers completed the eight-item instrument. Overall, the reliability, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses suggest that the presented scale can be used to determine how teachers perceive institutional support for online and blended learning professional development and provides evidence supporting a validity argument. Recommendations for the academic and practical use of the ISOBL questionnaire are made.

KEYWORDS:

• Adult learning
• Distance education and online learning
• Teacher professional development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 (see: Table 3.)

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Agentschap voor Innovatie door Wetenschap en Technologie [grant number 140029].