The organisation

There is no doubt that organisations change when enough of their members adopt digital technologies, and in the 1990s a think tank in MIT supported by a computer company identified the potential for radical change whereby a number of businesses had changed so much that they revised their core business. Similar maturity modelling of organisational change that supported the adoption of digital technologies in colleges followed in the UK and elsewhere. Review of educational processes are listed in a framework and the progress of the organisation as it ‘matures’ against commonly observed benchmarks is plotted in the framework. Perhaps the most comprehensive is eMM (eMaturity Modelling), which has been extensively researched by Steven Marshall in tertiary education in New Zealand and many other countries.

However, such maturity modelling is less valuable in the schooling sector and it may become outdated in tertiary education too. For example innovative schools described in case studies by the IEA’s SITES research team (see e.g. http://sitesdatabase.cite.hku.hk/case_db_public/m2_database_eng.asp?in_page=6) have not been forerunners for other schools. Indeed longitudinal research of the case study schools in Germany showed the many challenges of sustaining such innovation. Birgit Eikelmann identified the following factors:**