Presenting a Model for Enhancing Faculty Member's Social Capital with an Emphasis on Distance Education System

This study aims to provide an appropriate model to enhance the faculty member's social capital in distance education system. The method of the study is quantitative and descriptive-correlational. The statistical population of the study included all the faculty members of Payame Noor University in Iran. The sampling method was a multi-stage cluster sampling with proportional distribution. The sample size was determined equal to 280 individuals based on the Krejcie and Morgan table. Two researcher-made questionnaires were used in order for collecting the required data. The first questionnaire was designed to assess factors affecting the quality of distance education and the second one for measuring the social capital. The content validity of the questionnaires was confirmed by the experts and estimation of factor analysis also showed that the construct validity of both questionnaires is desirable. The reliability of the questionnaires was calculated using Cronbach's alpha as 0.87 and 0.95, respectively. In addition to the descriptive statistics, the inferential statistics (hierarchical regression and structural equation) was also applied for analyzing the data. The results of the hierarchical regression showed that at the first level of the underlying factors, the greatest effect on the social capital is related to the family's cultural literacy (0.48) and at the second level, among the organizational factors, the greatest influence is related to the variables of the educational function (0.58) and the communication space (0.52) and the lowest impact is associated with the variable of the electronic technology (0.34). In addition, the obtained results from the structural equations confirmed suitability of the designed model with the data.