The determinant of faculty attitude to academic (over-) work load: An econometric analysis

Whilst educational managers and entrepreneurs are expanding online education opportunities, at least some academics are becoming less enthusiastic about the initiative. As a result, a complex and in many ways contested working environment for academics is emerging in tertiary institutions. Some academics are showing dissatisfaction with their workload. Scholars argue that academics’ job satisfaction is highly correlated with students’ learning outcomes. While economists advocate the expansion of online education in the context of rising costs of university education in economics literature, the psychological states of teaching academics are overlooked in economics literature. Attitudes to academic (over-)workload are a psychological issue in tertiary education, particularly in universities globally where online education has a strong presence. This paper deals with teachers’ attitude at an Australia university. This study explains the variations in academics’ attitudes to (over-)workload at an Australian university. For this study we have used primary data collected from a single Australian university - University of Southern Queensland (USQ) - during the period of February-March 2014. The total population size for this study is approximately 400 (four hundred), who are distributed across the then five faculties of the university. The data are collected online. In response to our online survey invitation, 83 (eighty-three) participating academics has taken part in the survey. We have used Likert-type data, where the scale of measurement is represented by ordinal numbers. Research methods used in this study are descriptive analysis of data and inferential statistics based on probit regression. The estimated coefficients of the regression analysis show that three variables are statistically significant at the 5 per cent level. These variables are: the use of the Internet per week, the native language (English) status and the academic qualification status. However, the estimates of the marginal effect show that because of a change of native English status from zero to one, an academic is 23 per cent more likely to be strongly agreed with the statement – online teaching increases academic workload. This implies that attitudes to academic (over-)workload vary among the academics. The policy implication is that education administrators will have to give attention to the working conditions of the academics in order to expand online education successfully.