Online Instructor Clusters: Implementation Frequency of Instructional Activities

The purpose of this study was to group instructors based on their patterns of implementing activities in their online courses, to examine factors that influenced differences within clusters, and to explore whether cluster membership affected instructor satisfaction. Data were collected from faculty at a university in the western United States with the use of three instruments that measure pedagogical beliefs, implementation of instructional activities, and instructor satisfaction. Latent class analysis method was used to identify instructor groups and examine how the groups differed in pedagogical beliefs, characteristics, and satisfaction. The resulting two-cluster solution includes two orientations: content and learner-centric. Of the covariates examined, constructivist pedagogical beliefs and gender were the significant predictors of cluster membership. Results also showed a significant difference between the predicted clusters pertaining to online instructor satisfaction.