Online Education Institutionalized: Through the Lens of Faculty, Administrator, and External Organization Institutional Logics

• In Event: 416 - Regular Session. Sociology of Higher Education II - "Legitimate" Institutional Expansion, Transformation, and Stratification

Abstract

Using data from a content analysis of 25 years of articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education about online and distance education, this paper explores the discourses of faculty members, college and university administrators, and external organizations through the lens of institutional logics theory. This theoretical perspective brings to light the values and beliefs about how quality is defined and why access to higher education is important to each stakeholder, and advances a critical examination of the ways that institutional logics have provided the foundation for each group’s perspective on online education. For the past decade, less than a third of faculty have viewed online education as legitimate, yet online education has grown such that over 85 percent of higher education institutions offer online courses or programs (Allen and Seaman 2013). Central to the analysis of this seeming contradiction is the idea that the debate about online education is not actually about the merits of online learning as a form of pedagogy but about the transformation of the field of higher education itself. While the faculty discourse is primarily informed by a professional logic concerned with academic quality and the changing role of faculty within the university, administrator and external groups have successfully legitimated their market-driven actions by connecting the idea of access to higher education to broader societal level values of social justice and equality. This empirical study also contributes an understanding of how different actors can use the same concept in different ways based on institutional logics.

Author

• Lauren A. Nicoll, Northeastern University