Less is More in Distance Education - The Contradictory Relationship Between Rapid Adoption and Radical Innovation

This paper reports on an exploratory study of the introduction of a system for web-based education at a Scandinavian University college (HTU). The study documents how the system was rapidly adopted and spread throughout the organisation, in spite of remarkably little assistance from central management to support the process. The results indicate that this can be explained by the lean characteristics of the system in combination with social factors such as demands from students and shared perceptions of technology. Finally, it is concluded that technical and methodological innovation to some extent is obstructed by the same factors that support diffusion and adoption.