Drop a Pebble in the Water

Abstract

This article responds to Stoten’s (2016) article in Management Teaching Review on the use of PebblePad+ (PP+) to support learning, teaching, and assessment. We examined the realities of efforts to engender curriculum change using PP+ on a large undergraduate thesis course within a U.K. business school. We analyzed 2,143 emails between the 123 supervising-faculty and the professors leading the course. Field notes supplemented these data. We have demonstrated that while 18 supervising-faculty asserted the value of the use of PP+ (14.6%), the majority of faculty (54.5%) expressed concerns about using this technology, with eight supervisors failing to use the technology at all. We propose that these latter reactions resulted from a lack of self-efficacy with technology, a perceived task–technology mismatch, and perhaps, most significant, a threatened sense-of-self as “expert” in the eyes of their students and peers. We offer three key recommendations for readers who are considering technology-mediated change.