Educational Technology Management: Infrastructure and Innovation, a case study from a K-12 private School in Australia.

In order to follow an ICT strategic plan, IT management are required to efficiently assign resources, both monetary and people, to tasks and projects. In an education setting, those projects aligned with the ICT strategic plan can encompass capital required for large ICT infrastructure across an entire educational campus and the smaller innovative projects requiring recurrent budget expenses. This research has set out to find the components, which contribute to both capital and recurrent ICT budgets in order to better understand links with teaching and learning and how technology items are used to create greater learning outcomes for students.
Both of these types of projects require a balance of resources in order to efficiently operate a stable and supportive ICT infrastructure and the use of innovative technology and teaching methods used in the classroom. The ultimate goal is the production and support for greater learning outcomes for students. This thesis includes a mixed-methods approach, using a constructivist ontological stance, to understanding the balance required between ICT infrastructure and innovation in education in a case study set in a K-12 private School in Australia.
This balance often plays out a game of tug-of-war on a continuum of control/slack where accountability for efficiently run ICT infrastructure weighs war with the striving efforts of teaching and learning to foster innovation in an educational context. In the majority of cases, innovation uses technology, which in turn, is supported by the efficient use of ICT infrastructure. However, other factors which help to foster the inclusion of innovation in education, warrant understanding from an IT management perspective, in order to provide greater support for teaching and learning. Furthermore, senior leadership in education would benefit from staff feedback, in terms of whether the intended innovative technology and learning culture is suitable for fostering and sustaining innovation in the classroom and work place.
In addition, when IT management know of the types of elements fostering innovation in the classroom, technology can be purchased and directed to support this endeavour. To this end, a School Innovation Rating was developed to help decision makers understand how the School culture and potential for the intended new technology would be accepted and utilised by staff. It is hoped that this School Innovation Rating will help guide staff who are responsible for managing budgets.
To increase the chance for transferability and confirmability for other readers of the thesis results, a high level of research rigour was utilised during this research.