Abstract
The research investigated the attitudes, expectations and experiences of academic staff at selected Nigerian Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), on the use of Learning Management Systems (LMSs) for teaching and learning. Typically, HEIs want to advance the teaching and learning processes by capitalising on the affordances of digital technologies for teaching and learning. This most often manifests in efficient adoption and utilisation of digital LMSs. In Nigeria, the educational system has been somewhat slow and inconsistent in its response to integrating digital technologies in its practices. However, HEIs are often attempting digital technologies integration by the adoption and use of LMSs to encourage the teaching and learning processes. Accordingly, HEIs have either developed LMSs suited to their needs or subscribed to the proprietary ones for online course delivery to meet students’ learning needs and faculties’ instructional needs. Nonetheless, there is dearth of published research that reports on the extent of the uptake of LMSs by Nigerian academic staff or the way they used these for teaching and learning. Additionally, several impediments abound to appropriate planning and implementation of LMSs in Nigerian HEIs. For these reasons, the study explored how teaching staff at three selected universities in Nigeria implemented and used LMSs in their teaching and learning practices, and particularly examined those factors that facilitated and hindered the adoption and use of LMSs. The methodological design was a quantitative, explanatory correlational survey. Therefore, the Technology Acceptance Model 2 and Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology were integrated and modified, by adding the ‘Design decision’ and ‘Staff performance’ variables to better adapt the research in the context of Nigerian HEIs. Teaching staff (n=122) from three universities were targeted using a simple random sampling method and requested to complete an online survey. Firstly, the results revealed that despite respondents’ (teaching staff) reasonable knowledge and skills of digital technologies, their utilisation, satisfaction, frequency and rating levels on the features of LMSs for teaching and learning were less than optimal. Secondly, respondents at the three selected universities had positive attitude and intention toward LMSs, but the technical and organisational infrastructure, and institutional support and policies, required to make competent use of LMSs for teaching and learning were not made available to them. Additionally, the r2 values during data analysis, inferred that ‘effort expectancy’ and ‘facilitating xviii conditions’ variables explained 43% and 42% respectively of the variance in teaching staff’s adoption of LMSs for teaching and learning. The work made an important contribution to the knowledge set which described how teaching staff at HEIs in Nigeria implemented and used LMSs in their teaching and learning practices. Therefore, the research findings were used to identify deficits in the institutional implementation and staff use of LMSs, which in turn allowed for proposing implementation strategies and professional development programmes to HEIs, that could build the capacity of teaching staff to use LMSs proficiently and may also be useful to other institutional managers to plan and implement LMSs, in a manner that may meet the instructional needs of teaching staff.
Ph.D. (Information and Communications Technology in Education)