The Level of E-Learning Integration at the University of Jordan: Challenges and Opportunities

E-Learning is playing a significant role in education to improve students’ skills and teach them new ways for managing their knowledge and information. Many universities and institutions of higher education have recognized the value of the Internet in changing the way people learn. Traditional classroom courses can be augmented with interactive materials on the Web and old fashioned courses can be transformed into e-Learning environments. However, few academic institutions have been able to embrace e-Learning in a way that enables widespread innovative uses of educational technology throughout the institution. Despite the fact that there are some cases of Faculty in Jordanian Universities carrying their own experiments and using trial and error to search for innovations to enhance their courses, these efforts are not matched with a large-scale institutional support and structure to move these initiatives from innovations to standards. We need to spread the culture of using e-Learning technology to enhance the quality of learning. Thus, this study aims to investigate the degree of e-Learning integration at the University of Jordan. Specifically, the purpose of this study was to identify potential factors related to the use of e-Learning tools by faculty members (users and non-users) at this University. This study was conducted during the Fall Semester of 2012/2013 with a population consisted of 1314 faculty members. Overall, the results of this study revealed that an increase in salary, teaching workload, and training are the most important factors related to faculty use of e-Learning tools at this Jordanian university. Furthermore, the results showed that faculty rank and perceived use of e-Learning tools were related to the level of faculty use of e-Learning.