Barriers of Digital Technologies in Higher Education : A Teachers’ Perspective from a Swedish University

Abstract: Digital Technologies are gaining more and more importance in higher education as they not only reshape and digitalize the on-campus teacher-student communication but also –  in times of globalization – open up education to the world. It further facilitates individuals who would have been otherwise excluded from education to attend distance education programs. Such possibilities of digital technologies depict new opportunities for universities and enables them to emerge into a whole new market. Apart from all these benefits, the permeation of digital technologies in higher education brings along challenges and barriers for the teachers.   Consequently, the purpose of this study is to identify the digital technologies that teachers are using to fulfill their daily teaching activities and to investigate the prevalent attitude of teachers towards digital technologies in higher education. It further identifies the barriers that arise with the adaption of the respective technologies and examines the strategies which teachers developed to deal with these barriers. For this purpose, the qualitative study follows the interpretive paradigm and adopts semi-structured interviews and a focus group in a young medium sized Swedish University. After coding, categorizing and conceptualizing the findings, the study shows that teachers have an overall positive attitude towards digital technologies but also experience negative emotions when encountering barriers. The identified barriers range from cognitive limitations of teachers, to technological downsides, to issues concerning the support over to institutional constraints. The findings furthermore show that the attitudes, barriers, and strategies to circumvent the barriers are intertwined with and have impacts on each other.