Open online system adoption in K-12 as a democratising factor

Abstract

This study seeks to understand how district size and wealth factors influence the adoption of open-source online systems in primary and secondary (K-12) education. Most schools now utilise online systems (e.g. CMS, LMS, SIS) for a number of purposes, and it is anticipated that no-cost and open-source systems could be of great value for democratising access to information system resources and improving the plight of struggling schools. By using web extraction techniques to collect all public school website data for K-12 districts in the target state (n = 133) and merging this data-set with public financial records, researchers conducted a series of one-way analysis of covariance and multivariate analysis of variance tests to determine main effects. Results indicate that larger, wealthier districts are more likely to adopt open source systems than smaller, poorer districts. These results call into question the democratising impact of open-source systems for struggling schools and suggest the importance of literacy development for supporting open adoption.