MOOCs and the Online Delivery of Business Education What's new? What's not? What now?

Abstract

While the past two decades have produced much promise (and accompanying research) on the use of information technology (IT) in business school courses, it is not entirely clear whether IT has truly 'transformed' management education. There are compelling arguments on both sides. On one hand, advocates for the transformative role of IT can point to several success stories. On the other hand, skeptics on the role of IT in management education can also point to support for their view. This lack of consensus has led researchers in Academy of Management Learning and Education to call for scholars to confront the bias against online education (Redpath, 2012) and engage in serious research on online education (Arbaugh, DeArmond, & Rau, 2013). In this work, we respond to these calls for research by using Adaptive Structuration Theory to develop a conceptual model of three factors that influence the use of IT in business education. We review prior research for each factor and use the conceptual model to identify implications for the design and delivery of business education. Based on the implications, we offer recommendations and recognize challenges for business schools and faculty related to the use of IT in business education. 1 Throughout the paper, we use the term 'information technology' (abbreviation IT) to refer to the overall domain or discipline, and we use the descriptive term 'technology' (or technology tools) to refer to the specific information technologies used in business education. Use of the descriptive term 'technology' is consistent with Adaptive Structuration Theory research on which the conceptual model in this paper is based (DeSanctis & Poole, 1994; Orlikowski, 1992).

Individual Appropriation of Learning Management Systems—Antecedents and Consequences

“…Researchers originally applied AST to understand the appropriation process of groups in the domain of group support systems (GSS) (Chin et al, 1997). Despite this major focus on GSS, research has also highlighted that AST may serve as a metatheory (Bostrom, Gupta, & Thomas, 2009) for understanding other complex information systems, such as LMS (Tennant et al, 2014) or massive open online courses (MOOCs) (Whitaker, New, & Ireland, 2016) that are applied in sociotechnical systems. Though in the past usually used on a group level, AST serves as a multilevel theory (Bélanger, Cefaratti, Carte, & Markham, 2014), and researchers have applied it particularly in a TML context on an individual level to understand how individuals use IT in their learning process (Gupta & Bostrom, 2013;Hardin, Looney, & Fuller, 2014).…”

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The Coming of a Perfect Storm? "Forced Privatisation" and Precarious Labour in South African Academia

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