Abstract:

The key drivers of growth for flexible learning are the globalized economy and advanced technologies. Huge investments are made by education institutions to enable changes in teaching and learning methodologies and to keep up with the increased demand of potential e-learning technologies (Severna, 2016:22)

Now the big challenge would be to do assessments aim to measure the level of effectiveness, ease usage, flexibility and mainly the perceptions that underlies in the learning management systems after the huge investments made and new technologies introduced.

This study is aimed at the perception of the students towards the software application that provides an online learning called Blackboard. The study will outline the adoption of e-learning at the Durban University of Technology and extent of the usage of Blackboard as a learning management system. This study investigated the perception of students with regards to the access and use of Blackboard.

Qualitative approach has been used to collect data. Semi-structured interviews were used. The sample of 20 out of 244 population was drawn using probability sampling, simple random sampling was used.

Most of the students perceive Blackboard as an appropriate tool and an innovative project but they believed that it has difficulties and can only be suitable as an alternative to assist with the efficiency in the teaching and learning exercise.

The students believed that Blackboard has so many tools by many tools but they are useless because they hardly or never use them, which makes absolutely no sense to have something but cannot use it.

The recommendations made were that proper training and understanding of Blackboard need to be implemented to students, because the researchers believes that the project of Blackboard can be very effective and useful if all people had a common understanding of how to use all the tools offered by the Blackboard package.

Keywords:

Blackboard, Learning Management System, e-learning and e-learning technologies.