Abstract:

This paper provides evidence of legitimacy of Blackboard in one selected university in South Africa. It draws from official institutional reports to document how an institution moves beyond mere adoption of an LMS, and highlights the progression process leading up to the acceptance Blackboard, a Learning Management System (LMS) until it is legitimated. Though literature abound with studies on the adoption and acceptance of Blackboard and other LMSs in institutions of higher learning, there is, however, limited scholarship on how a particular LMS becomes legitimated, and thus embedded in the culture and ethos of the institution. This paper shows the usefulness of the legitimacy framework in understanding the processes for legitimising and institutionalising an LMS. It also offers practical guidelines, criteria, and indicators of legitimacy of Blackboard in an institution of higher learning. It further suggests that the legitimacy framework can be adapted and adopted for use in the evaluation and evidencing of the legitimacy of other Technology-enhanced Learning (TeL) tools and applications, post-adoption. The legitimacy framework's utility value in guiding processes leading to the legitimacy and institutionalisation of an innovation, as well as its potential as an evaluative tool for legitimacy, is appraised.

Keywords:

Legitimacy, Learning Management System (LMS), Blackboard, Institutionalization, Technology-enhanced Learning, e-learning.