Modelling the complexity of technology adoption in higher education teaching practice

The study reported in this paper examines the inter-relationships between organisational roles during the process of sustaining the diffusion of e-learning innovations in higher education teaching practice. Through this process, new ways of teaching and learning with digital technologies become adopted by a mainstream group of academics in similar university teaching roles. Unlike top-down implementations of enterprise-wide e-learning management systems that succeed because they are mandated by university policies, e-learning innovations that originate in higher education teaching practice are generally bottom-up initiatives that mostly fail to achieve mainstream adoption. Previous studies have viewed technology adoption in teaching practice as a simple linear process. These studies have relied on traditional case study and survey research methods to identify individual and institutional actors and causal factors in this process. The methods used in these studies do not explain the inter-relationships of actors and factors in what is a dynamic, non-linear, complex process. This study is the first to investigate this problem from a complexity perspective. The study uses computer modelling to simulate and explore the inter-relationships between organisational roles within university systems that enable and inhibit mainstream bottom-up adoption of e-learning innovations that originate in higher education teaching practice.