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Distance education plays an important role in broadening educational access and increasing higher educational opportunities. The success, however, for any distance education initiative relies on a critical and core resource, namely having participating faculty who provide quality instruction. This study uses survey design and diffusion of innovation theory to examine faculty participation in relation to their technology use, their attitudes toward technology and distance education, and their adoption of innovations at a public postsecondary 10-campus system. Ordinal regression analysis identified 20 significant variables (16 predictors representing the four latent dimensions of the conceptual model and four demographic characteristics) that explain faculty participation in distance education. The findings identify a number of core issues underlying faculty participation and non-participation in distance education which pose implications for policy and practice relevant to technology use and skills, training and development, course design and technical support, quality issues, and workload and compensation.

This study identified the commonalities underlying the experiences of ethnic and racial minority faculty members at a predominantly white research university. Despite the heterogeneity of "minority" faculty, their common experiences included: (a) the bicultural stance they cultivated, (b) the ethnocentrism they perceived, and (c) the discriminatory behavior they experienced. This paper explores the usefulness of theories of race and ethnic relations in aiding understanding of the common experiences of those perceived as "other" by the dominant majority.

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