When the LMS usage numbers show most courses running on the same four features, the useful next question is not about the faculty. It is about the rollout. Feature adoption turns out to be fairly predictable from how a platform was introduced in the first place, which means it responds to design.
What a faculty member is weighing
Consider the decision behind not adding a feature. An instructor has a course that works: students learn, evaluations are fine, the department is content. Adopting something new means opening up what currently functions, spending hours they do not have to spare rebuilding part of it, and accepting real risk that the new version is rougher. In front of live students, this term.
Against that sits a feature they have never seen work in a course like theirs, whose benefit to this course nobody has made concrete. Declining that trade is entirely reasonable. Decades of technology-adoption research say the same thing more formally: people adopt a tool when they believe it will genuinely help them, and believe it will not cost much to learn (Davis, 1989). The operational features, posting the syllabus, collecting assignments, keeping grades, pass both tests easily, because they map directly onto tasks the instructor is already doing. Those are the ones that stick.
Two kinds of barrier
Peggy Ertmer’s framework is the clearest lens on this. First-order barriers are external: access, time, equipment, a training session. Second-order barriers are internal: what an instructor believes about good teaching in their field, how confident they feel with a given tool, and whether reworking a course that already works seems worth it (Ertmer, 1999).
Most rollout budgets go entirely toward first-order barriers. A launch webinar, a knowledge base, a help desk. Necessary, but not sufficient. The second-order barriers are what decide whether a feature becomes part of how someone teaches, and they respond to a different kind of support, built around the instructor’s own course and a problem they care about.
What a rollout that works looks like
Start with the problem, not the feature. A session on “grading eighty papers consistently, faster, in a way that holds up on appeal, using the rubric tool” reaches the faculty who have that exact problem. A session on “the new rubric tool” reaches far fewer of them. The Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge framework captures why: effective use lives at the intersection of content, pedagogy, and tool, and training that only addresses the tool tends not to carry over into practice (Mishra & Koehler, 2006).
Work inside the instructor’s own course. Support that produces one real improvement in the section someone is teaching right now builds momentum a feature tour simply cannot. The most durable motivator for demanding work is a felt sense of progress on something the person genuinely cares about (Amabile & Kramer, 2011).
Make it easy to try small. A faculty member should be able to use a feature in one assignment, in one section, and watch a colleague’s version already working, before committing an entire course to it. Whether people can try something new at low stakes, and watch it succeed somewhere nearby, is one of the strongest predictors of whether it spreads.
Give faculty real choice in how they meet a goal. Autonomy, competence, and connection to peers are the conditions under which people sustain a new behavior (Ryan & Deci, 2000). A program offering genuine options, building skill instead of assuming it, and putting faculty in a group doing shared work holds where a program built on access-plus-a-deadline settles right back to where it started.
Where the gap is worth closing
Not every quiet feature needs to spring to life. A seminar taught well with four tools does not need forty. The gap is worth closing when a feature was part of the original purchase justification, when it supports an obligation like accessibility, or when it is the thing that would carry feedback and connection in a fully online course. That last case deserves the most attention. A student whose entire experience of a course is a folder of documents and a column of grades is getting something thinner than the catalog promised, and the features that would fix it (working discussion, fast feedback, low-stakes practice) are usually exactly the ones a default rollout leaves dormant.
Starting from the assumption that the instructor is a capable professional who simply has not been given a concrete reason or an easy path in is what points toward the design that moves these numbers.
Charlie Wrightmann is a consultant at Wrightmann Education Technologists. Part of the Learning Platforms series.
References
- Amabile, T. M., & Kramer, S. J. (2011). The Progress Principle. Harvard Business Review Press.
- Davis, F. D. (1989). Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user acceptance of information technology. MIS Quarterly, 13(3), 319–340. https://doi.org/10.2307/249008
- Ertmer, P. A. (1999). Addressing first- and second-order barriers to change. Educational Technology Research and Development, 47(4), 47–61. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02299597
- Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2006). Technological pedagogical content knowledge. Teachers College Record, 108(6), 1017–1054. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9620.2006.00684.x
- Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68