Assessing E-learning Readiness of Human Resources in Iranian Universities

The development of information technology has provided new capacities for higher education that one of these capacities is "e-learning". As a result, the implementation of electronic learning systems (ELS) has become one of the most important investment trends in different countries. The successful implementation of these systems will be achieved when the readiness of the university is provided in terms of human, infrastructural and content dimensions. From the human perspective, establishing an effective interaction between instructor and learner has been identified as the key factor in the success of ELS.
This paper aims to assess the readiness of faculty members and students for using ELSs in academic environments; so, we first formulated various appropriate readiness assessment measures of e-learning readiness. Then we gathered readiness data from 8 Iranian comprehensive universities, through a survey. According to the average score and importance grade of each measure, we calculated the readiness level of faculty members and students in the selected universities for each measure.
The results indicated that the score of over 25% of the students’readiness measures and about 40% of the faculty members’ readiness measures were "less than medium", and both total average scores were "medium". These results confirm that the policy-makers and deans of universities should be aware of the ELSs benefits, the human resources' empowerment mechanisms, and the level of access of instructors and learners to the network facilities.