A Generic Framework for eLearning Adoption

Abstract

The significant relevance of eLearning in the 21st century gives room to proliferate eLearning platforms and frameworks in the digital world. The selection and adoption of an appropriate framework tailored to the intrinsic challenge of a learning institution becomes cumbersome. This may be attributed to the lack of a formal approach for the classification and evaluation of existing eLearning frameworks and selection of a framework for eLearning adoption. This paper seeks to alleviate the foregoing problems by developing a generic eLearning framework aimed at enabling learning institution to make informed selection without loss of generality. The proposed generic framework consists of well-defined building blocks that are considered fundamentals for the translation of the framework into an automated working eLearning Platform. Each building block in the proposed generic framework was surveyed in the context of Ethiopian higher learning institutions. A questionnaire based online survey was conducted on about 100 participants (students, teachers and administrators). The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) in SPSS V-25 to investigate to what extent the building blocks are relevant to the implementation of an eLearning system. The study found that the generic framework in general and the building blocks of the generic framework namely institution, culture, technology, pedagogy, management, evaluation and ethics in particular are significant for eLearning implementation. As a matter of future work, this will be used as a basis for taxonomy development of eLearning frameworks. Furthermore, the full description of components and elements of the building blocks should be investigated as basis for the maturity assessment of eLearning frameworks in real-life contexts.