An Examination of the Diffusion and Implementation of Learning Management Systems in Higher Education.

Abstract

Technology, broadly defined, has long been offered as a solution to many of the problems in higher education in the United States. Most frequently, technology has been held up as a solution to the challenge of improving teaching and learning in university classrooms. While many technologies had the potential to enhance learning environments, few found their way into regular use in large numbers of classrooms. In this dissertation, I describe the diffusion and implementation of one of the few learning technologies to achieve both widespread diffusion and regular use in classrooms: learning management systems (LMS). In the first part of this dissertation, I argue that prior research does not adequately address why LMSs achieved wide scale diffusion across higher education. This section of the dissertation draws on insights from neoinstitutionalism and describes how LMSs gained legitimacy as an innovation, which propelled their diffusion. To understand how LMSs gained legitimacy, I trace the ways in which LMSs were described and justified across Chronicle of Higher Education texts from 1995 to 2011. Based on how LMSs were described and justified, I argue that these systems gained legitimacy as they developed into a regular response for universities in the face of a changing technological landscape. In the second part of this dissertation, I describe how few studies adequately assess the ways in which these systems are actually used in classrooms. To describe how LMSs are actually used in university classrooms, I analyzed system log data that tracked users’ interactions with an LMS at one large research university. These analyses demonstrate that instructors largely used the LMS to manage course materials. Drawing on prior research related to the implementation of instructional innovation, I argue that LMS tools were used in these ways because instructors could experience gains in efficiencies without having to change their preexisting instructional practices.