Analyzing needs, readiness, and epistemological beliefs of students and faculty to implement university 2.0 as social platform of teaching and learning

With the advance of social technology, University 2.0 is to bring a user interactive Web 2.0 system into higher education settings, as a more powerful way of constructing and sharing knowledge. For the successful implementation of the 2.0 platform, this study investigated how faculty and students perceived this new learning system by assessing their needs, readiness, and personal epistemology at the College of Bionano. In this study, 10 students and 13 professors participated in a focus group discussion and a survey respectively, and both took an Epistemology Questionnaire. According to this study, faculty and student group expressed their opinions on issues such as academic affairs, evaluation, and copyright, and showed disparities in their epistemological proclivities. Whereas the professors had a conservative view of the students' role in knowledge creation and knowledge reproduction, the students needed a change in perception in the educational setting as well as in learning systems. This result implied that the university needs to investigate its constituents' needs, readiness, and beliefs surrounding education so that the recent participative system could effectively contribute to meeting the real needs of learners in the fields of sciences and engineering, as well as in the primary mission of the university.