programmes and allowed for students to have access to consistent technology. All of this facilitated the uptake of elearning, and if one was a champion of such an approach, it could be viewed as a positive advancement. The LMS was the key to elearning becoming a mainstream approach.
However, there were two unfortunate side effects to the widescale adoption of LMSs. The first was that academia often outsourced the technology and also the approach to elearning. By adopting commercial systems such as Blackboard, they gained a robust and quick solution, but they often lost the expertise or the control required to innovate in this area. Such relationships were not always mutually beneficial either, such as when Blackboard attempted to impose patent rights to generic elearning requirements such as tutor group formation (Geist 2006).
The second issue was largely a function of the first: rather than being a stepping stone to further elearning experimentation, the LMS became an end point in itself. As institutional processes came into place, they created a sediment around the system, so the question was no longer one of ‘what can we do with elearning?’ but rather one of ‘what do I need to do with the LMS to meet the university requirement?’ The online classroom model, or using the LMS as a repository for lecture notes, came to be seen as elearning itself, and further experimentation often ceased. This demonstrates the importance of policy in establishing uptake, but also of allowing a policy that has sufficient room within it to allow for innovation.
Groom and Lamb (2014) see the LMS as the prime suspect in a loss of innovation around elearning in universities. Their case against the LMS has five main points:
- Systems–The LMS privileges a technology management mindset.
