The Adoption of Virtual Learning Environments by Academic Staff of University of Nairobi

Abstract

Higher Learning educational institutions in this modern age and time are now faced with the challenge of a consistently growing demand for places in various academic programs. Most institutions of higher learning around the world are increasingly embracing the use of ICT as a tool of virtual learning delivery to respond to the demand for increased access to their resources and have thus created virtual learning environments (VLEs). In Kenya just like most developing countries the adoption of VLEs by academic staff still lags behind as compared to the developed world and therefore this study attempted to establish how academic staff in higher learning are responding to virtual learning environments by describing the factors influencing academic staff at the university of Nairobi to adopt the use of the Multimedia learning portal, the extent of adoption and the levels of awareness on the multimedia learning portal at the university of Nairobi.In conducting the study, a descriptive survey approach was used and it involved collecting data from the university of Nairobi academic staff. The target population for this research was the academic staff from the school of business and the school of computing and informatics where the population of academic staff stood at 93 and 24 respectively which gave a total of 117 academic staff. A sample of 35 academic staff was chosen as the most appropriate and primary data was used for this study and it was collected by means of a self-administered structured questionnaire. The research further utilized descriptive analysis, cross tabulation and regression analysis to analyze collected data. The computer software used to aid analysis of the data collected was SPSS Version 17.0 and Microsoft Excel. The findings of the study revealed that the academic staff at the University of Nairobi are fully aware of the existence of the multimedia learning portal and although the existing multimedia learning portal provided a number of tools and features, the extent of adoption proved to be dismally low with varying levels of adoption depending on the tools and their purpose. The regression results indicated that the R square value was 23.3% which therefore implied 11.8% of the variance was explained by the independent variables used and this was a very low explanatory power for the model.Also the fact that academic staff were not ready to use the multimedia learning portal could be an indication that when academic staff are not ready to use the portal, it reduces the adoption by 59% (t = 2.802).