Structural Model of Teaching Quality Improvement Factors for Academics Professional Development of UAE Higher Education Institutions

Abstract

UAE government has allocated fund to improve teaching and learning in the higher education institutions. However, several studies found that the professional development programmes conducted still not much improvement as expected. Hence this paper is to present a structural model of factors in Teaching Quality Improvement for Academics Professional Development of UAE Higher Education Institutions. The data used for this model was collected through structured questionnaire survey and the respondents were selected using sample purposive sampling technique. The structural model was developed using AMOS SEM software. Each of the measurement model was assessed using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) of the software until it achieves goodness of fit. Then these models are tied up into structural model according to the hypothetical model. The structural model was initially assessed using CFA to find the goodness of fit. Once it achieved the goodness of fit, it used path analysis for hypotheses testing.  Results of the testing found that that five of the seven hypotheses are significant.  It seems that the two hypotheses are not significant to Academics Professional Development which are Policy and strategy and Technological factors. However, as a whole, it can be concluded that the teaching quality improvement factors are significantly required for Academics Professional Development of UAE Higher Education Institutions.