Meaning-making in virtual learning environment enabled educational innovations: a 13-year longitudinal case study

ABSTRACT

Despite the high expectation of virtual learning environments (VLEs) to accelerate meaningful educational innovations for more interactive learning and teaching, resistance to changes exists, and innovations are fading over time. How to promote widespread and steady adoption of VLE enabled innovations remains an open question. This study uses mixed methods to examine 13 years of VLE logs, archival documents, and interviews with 51 teachers to investigate two research questions: What is the threshold stage of the institutionalisation process of VLE enabled innovation, and how does the innovation become institutionalised in the threshold stage? We found that the majority VLE enabled innovations (such as virtual classrooms and interactive quizzes) were abandoned or faded before the new or changed learning and teaching practices were fully habitualised. The empirical results show that individual cognitive divergence and collective consensus could promote habitualised institutional leverage through a threshold process, namely, meaning-making. These findings extend our understanding of the cognitive mechanism, and we suggest that universities provide continuous facilitating and teacher support, both on technological use and pedagogical design, to help teachers develop the meaning of the action as a priority. Research significance and implications to the educational transformation in the COVID-19 pandemic are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Virtual learning environment
• interactive learning
• innovation
• meaning-making
• individual divergence
• collective consensus

Acknowledgement

We thank editors and anonymous reviewers for providing constructive comments to strengthen the manuscript. We thank Dr Trevor Mahy and Dr Simon Schweighofer (Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University) for proofreading and their insightful suggestions on the statistic visualisation of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China: [Grant Number 71772152].

Notes on contributors

Na Li

Na Li is a PhD candidate at the University of Liverpool and Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, an Educational Developer, and a Senior Fellow of the Advance Higher Education. Her areas of research interests include the virtual learning environment, technology adoption, cultural diversity in higher education, educational development and institutional theory in higher education.

Xiaojun Zhang

Xiaojun Zhang is a senior associate professor and the Executive Dean of Academy of Future Education at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, IR 814, South Campus, No.8 Chongwen Road Suzhou, Jiangsu Province. E-mail: [email protected]. As a Principle Fellow of the Advance Higher Education, his research interests include institutional change and the role of leadership in the institutional change in the higher education context.

Maria Limniou

Maria Limniou is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Education and Innovation at the University of Liverpool and a Senior Fellow of the Advance Higher Education. She is interested in how students learn through the use of technology in class and/or outside class and how students can easily learn by integrating different learning tools into higher education.

Youmin Xi

Youmin Xi is a professor, board member and Executive President of Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University; Pro-Vice-Chancellor of University of Liverpool. His research and teaching areas cover strategic management and policy analysis, organisational behaviour and leadership, and educational management.