No, really, it’s true! How many do and don’t is difficult to say, but it seems clear that institutional take-up is significantly higher than take-up by individual academics. 95% of UK HE institutions have a VLE but if 50% of teaching staff use it across the country I’d be surprised to say the least. What do you think?
I recently completed my Master’s project which begins to explore the why not? See Why Don’t All Lecturers Make Use of VLEs? What Can the So-called “Laggards” Tell Us? (PDF). When writing this masterpiece 😉 I was unable to find any other research focussed on staff who have never used a VLE and asserted that there wasn’t any! However, one of my markers has suggested that I may have exaggerated this lack of non-adoption research. If anyone has anything on non-adoption of VLEs / LMSs based on research with those who haven’t adopted I’d love to hear.
Rather late in commenting here, but a year ago I presented some small scale research that looked a bit at VLE adoption issues.
http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/download/attachments/28147732/what-exactly-is-course-management-according-to-faculty.pdf
“What exactly is course management, according to faculty?” Presented at the 9th Sakai Conference (July 2008).
I think there’s a video of my talk online somewhere–I can hunt it down if you’re interested.
I am currently writing my dissertation (M.Ed)
Imagine my surprise to find a colleague who had written in the same field! I am early into my research at present and don’t even have a coherent title, but it’s along the lines of motivating the non-ICT specialist to use the VLE. However, I might have to change that because it does rather imply that all non-ICT specialists lack motivation in using the VLE (which in my experience is probably true, but one has to be careful not to make sweeping statements). I have worked at three schools in the past three years with VLEs (Fronter/ItsLearning/Fronter)and it is definitely my experience that there is a reluctance for staff to ‘climb aboard’. I am trying to find out why for my dissertation.