READINESS OF ACADEMIC STAFF FOR THE SMART CLASS ROOM IMPLEMENTATION; AN EMPIRICAL STUDY WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO FACULTY OF APPLIED SCIENCES, UVA WELLASSA UNIVERSITY SRI LANKA

Organizational Change and Development

Advanced technological applications are a common feature in every corner of the world regardless of the sector that operated in. Higher education sector also experiencing and adopting more advanced technologies as teaching methods. Uva Wellassa University is one of the Sri Lankan universities which is planning to implement smart classrooms (SCR) in order to improve the quality and teaching and learning process while enhancing the reliability of the information. Hence, this study was focused to identify the readiness of the academic staff towards the SCR implementation and could identify three independent variables through literature, which can impact on the readiness levels of the academic staff. The independent variables are, quality of change communication, participation and cohesion. Based on the census statistic method, all the academic staff of the Faculty of Applied Sciences, Uva Wellassa University has taken for the study. Standard and validated self-administered questionnaire was used for the purpose of data collection and the response rate was 73%. The study provided a supportive explanation of academic staff readiness on SCR implementation and hypotheses were tested using the multiple regression analysis. Cohesion has the most impact on change readiness of academic staff for this implementation and the quality of change communication has the second-highest impact. However, participation does not have a significant impact on the change readiness of academic staff. Further, readiness for the implementation is directly affected by the level of experience, level of education, age and gender. Level of education and the level of experience has an enormous dissimilarity on readiness while age and gender haven’t considerable variation.

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