Crossing the divide

Student and staff responses to changing an institutional learning management system

Abstract

Learning management systems (LMSs) are a ubiquitous feature of the higher education landscape. As with any other technological system, change in LMSs is inevitable as advances in computer and communication technologies render older systems obsolete. In this paper we respond to the call for more research on the impacts of LMS change by documenting a relatively large scale and fined grained quantitative investigation of the changes in user perceptions (both students and academic staff) of the functions of an institutional LMS across the period of transition to a new system between 2011 and 2012. We address the question, “Did the new LMS dramatically change the student and staff experience of using the system?” To a large extent, the answer is, “No”. The median absolute difference between all 2011 and 2012 mean ratings (as a percentage of the 2011 rating) was only 0.21 % for students and 0.26 % for staff.