INTEGRATING WEB-BASED LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM IN HOME-SCHOOL COMMUNICATION

Well-functioning home-school communication is seen as a fundamental prerequisite for improving parental involvement in school development and in children’s schooling. Traditionally, face-to-face, telephone and email contacts between teachers and parents have been the main pathways for home-school communication. Nowadays, almost all K-12 schools in Sweden have an integrated so-called learning management system (LMS) that enables the systematic management of school administration, teaching and learning, as well as internal and external information and communication. In spring 2015, one municipality in Sweden started to implement a new web-based LMS called Learning Space (LS) in all public schools. To evaluate its implementation process with regard to the teachers’ experiences, an online questionnaire was sent to all grade 1-12 teachers in the municipality. This study is part of the evaluation project. The purpose of this paper is to explore teachers’ (N=454) experiences and perceptions with regard to the use of LS in home-school communication. The utilisation of LMS framework developed by Asiri, Mahmud, Bakar and Ayub (2012) was adopted to identify critical factors for integrating new technology. The results indicated a great dissatisfaction with functional features of LS and the implementation process among the teachers, which negatively impacted the attitudes and beliefs towards the usefulness and ease of use of LS for communication between home and school. This in turn prevented teachers’ and parents’ use of LS, and caused a general decrease in home-school communication in daily practices, especially for those disadvantaged parents, according to the teachers. There is a need to reflect on the implementation process and to improve the system. A successful implementation of technology in education calls for policy commitment, quality features of the technical design, sufficient organisational support, and positive personal attitudes and efforts.