Handling Research Challenges: Understanding Teachers' Adoption Process of Education Technology

Introduction

“Today, I will defend my dissertation entitled ‘In-service ELL Teachers and Technology Adoption: Exploring Diffusion of Innovations in English Education’. In this presentation, I will give an over all idea of the work I have done during the last three years”. This is how I, the author of this chapter, started the moment that each graduate student is aiming to; however, reaching to that moment was not an easy task at all. For a researcher to be called a practionars scholar, he or she need to master some important skills and know very well the components of running a research project. During the research process, we all have certain goals to achieve and some challenges to deal with; some of the challenges are difficult to manage, while others are manageable. It is our research, yet it necessitates the involvement and management of many different factors to succeed in reaching the intended goals. Some of the very common, yet manageable challenges that each graduate student face starts in choosing a research topic, finding a true gap in the literature, writing a clear proposal, and getting approval of an advisor and committee members. From my experience, those mentioned challenges are the easiest to manage, however, challenges that are associated with getting access to a particular institute, recruiting participants, and having to deal with each participant in person are the two main difficult to manage challenges, especially for an international student, like me, whose research study involved seeking access to language institutes and coaching its teachers on how to integrate technology into their teaching pedagogy.

As someone who is coming from a very low tech area and who is first heard about the term education technology and its value in an American university, I became curious to know how the successful diffusion of educational technology can be achieved. I wanted to know as an individual how to help teachers and students in low tech context to be prepared for the 21^st century needs and challenges including the use of technology. Unfortunately, this dilemma is not only in developing countries, but it does exist in developed countries as well. For instance, research showed that regardless of the many benefits of using educational technology in classroom settings and the amount of money institutions spend on hard ware and software, teachers still resist using technology and that adequate examination of the process that leads to the adoption of educational technology by teachers in general and language teachers in particular is still lacking (El Shaban, 2017; Kessler, 2006).

Regadless of the technology gap that exists where I used to study and live in the US and regerdless of me offering free services to coach teachers on how to integrate technology effeiciantly and effecitively into their teaching pedagogy, receiving an adminstrative approval to conduct my research in a language institute was the toughest challenge that put a very heavey burden on my shoulders. Without an access to an institution, I will either end up stoping working on my dissertation or changing the technology intevention (the workshops) part that I was and I am still so passionate about. The last was not an option at all. Thus, in this chapter, I will reflect on my research journey including the challenges that I faced during the research process and how I solved them, but first, in the background section, I will give a brief introductory idea about my research topic.