Professional Development for E-learning and Educational Technology: Perspectives of Higher Education ELT Faculty in Pakistan

This thesis examines how higher-education English Language Teaching (ELT) faculty in Pakistan perceive, experience, and emotionally navigate professional development related to E-learning and educational technology (E-PD). Working within an interpretivist paradigm and informed by phenomenology, the study investigates the cognitive, affective, and institutional conditions framing faculty engagement with digital pedagogies. An explanatory sequential mixed-methods phenomenological design was adopted. A national survey (N = 390) generated quantitative insights into satisfaction with E-PD, institutional support, technological readiness, and perceived adequacy. This was followed by two qualitative rounds with 16 purposively selected participants: card-prompted interviews eliciting narrated experiences, and Blob Tree-prompted interviews enabling access to deeper emotional meanings, identity positions, and affective states. Findings illuminate a fragmented E-PD landscape that, although valued in principle, remains generic, operational, and insufficiently aligned with ELT-specific pedagogical practice. Quantitative patterns and qualitative accounts converge in portraying inconsistent institutional structures, variable resource availability, limited pedagogical modelling, and an absence of systematic follow-up. Participants’ motivations were predominantly intrinsic, shaped by a desire for professional competence and self-directed growth, yet constrained by workload pressures, inequitable opportunities, and emotional strain. A significant empirical observation is the complete absence of TPACK and comparable international Ed-Tech frameworks from participant discourse. Although several participants referenced institutional PD models, none identified a pedagogical-technological framework underpinning their digital training. This reveals a structural disjuncture between global theoretical models and local professional development ecologies. In response to this identified conceptual gap, the thesis advances the TPAACK model, an affectively enriched extension of TPACK. TPAACK incorporates affective knowledge as an essential domain, recognising that digital-pedagogy development is deeply shaped by emotional labour, vulnerability, identity negotiation, and relational dynamics. The model offers a contextually responsive framework that captures the intertwined cognitive, pedagogical, technological, and affective demands characterising faculty engagement with E-PD in Pakistan. The thesis contributes original insight to the limited literature on E-PD in Pakistani higher education by offering an integrated, phenomenologically grounded account of faculty experiences and by identifying implications for theory, institutional PD design, and future research on digital pedagogy, affect, and professional learning. Keywords: Affective dimensions; Digital pedagogy; E-learning; Educational technology (Ed-Tech); ELT faculty; Higher education; Professional development (E-PD); TPAACK Framework.<p></p>

Author dc:creator

• Saima Nomaan (21037949)

• Digital pedagogy
• Affective dimensions
• E-learning
• Educational technology (Ed-Tech)
• ELT faculty
• Professional development (E-PD)
• TPAACK Framework
• Higher education

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved
• Embargoed

Identifier

10779/exe.32603946.v1

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:figshare.com:article/32603946