The Fashionable Adoption of Online Learning Technologies in Australian Universities

During the 1990s, many Australian universities adopted innovative new online learning technologies without critical examination of their merit to those institutions, leading in some cases to wasted resources, unfulfilled expectations, program and organisational failure. Given that limited theoretical and empirical explanations have addressed this important research problem, this paper discusses and applies a management fashion framework to this research problem and argues that online learning technologies could be conceptualised as a management fashion, following the empirical work of Abrahamson and Fairchild (1999). The major contributions of this paper are to identify an important yet under-researched area in higher education research, demonstrate the utility of a management fashion framework in this context, and propose a number of recommendations for policy makers, university managers and academics confronted with educational innovations.