Exploring, understanding and addressing the appetite for change.

Abstract for this short paper given at ALT-C 2012:

University of the Arts London recently decided to change the core component of its VLE from Blackboard to Moodle. For the last five years the university has invested significant resources into mainstreaming Blackboard as an institutional learning and teaching environment and the majority of the evidence from the last three years demonstrates that Blackboard is increasingly embedded in the expectations and practice of staff and students throughout the university. Therefore a critical question emerges: why, despite the obvious growth and institutionalisation of the tool, is there currently such a significant drive and appetite for change?

This paper outlines the enquiry process and evidence discovered to support the drive for change that started with an extensive consultation with staff and students from across the university. This consultation process utilised questionnaires and focus groups which consistently revealed, especially among staff, a desire for change. This is despite the successful attempts, in accordance with the diffusion of innovation theory as proposed by Rogers, to systematically improve the relative advantage, compatibility, trailability and observability of the system while at the same time reducing the complexity, yet we find ourselves on the cusp of change. Utilising activity theory as an analytic framework a series of contradictions emerge that can be used to explain the desire for change.

We conclude that the process of customising and mainstreaming an innovation for an environment can lead to unintended and unexpected consequences that are not immediately visible in the types of standard system metrics used to demonstrate system mainstreaming. In effect, the drive for change appears less to do, at least in our context, with system functionality or product and more related to the changing nature and expectation of technology tools used to support learning and teaching. What appears most significant is to implement technology enhanced learning in ways that allow flexibility and innovation to flourish in conjunction with the bureaucracy of mainstreaming.