On trust and assurance: Towards a risk mitigation normative framework for eLearning adoption

This paper presents the results of an inquiry into trust as the main leverage for academics' appropriation of eLearning in Portuguese Higher Education Institutions (HEI). More specifically, the researchers set out to inductively develop a substantive theory that explains the connections between academics' perception-based micro-foundations of trust in eLearning, and the macro institutional arrangements and managerial calculability available or not to generate a relevant cognitive base and sufficient evidence of salient value, objective gains, recognition and reward. At a more superficial and initial level, issues of trust in eLearning seem to imply academics' variable acceptability of a perceived risk-laden technology, accumulated as a consequence of insufficient knowledge or technological background. Creating, upholding and maintain a favourable perception towards eLearning derives in this circumstance from both opportunistic and enthusiastic voluntary judgement, a leap of faith taken to reduce complexity or informed by the immediate salient values of eLearning, potentially erodible by scepticism or frustrating experiences of use, and not immediately or homogenously acknowledged by the academic staff. However, when the appropriation of eLearning collides with issues of organisational and environmental fit, namely at the level of career structure and rewards, academics' recognition, and the scholarship of teaching, new dimensions of trust are manifested. This occurs particularly in tension with ingrained organising principles that are explicit frameworks affecting the establishment of favourable eLearning appropriation behaviour. At the level of academics' perceptionbased micro-foundations of trust, research results demonstrate how trust affects the resiliency or inertia of academics when endogenously or exogenously prompted to adopt eLearning. At the level of macro-institutional arrangements and managerial calculability, research results reveal the social motives driving academics to identify with eLearning - thus combining their efforts towards eLearning development - and demonstrate how trust relates to the management of identification and commitment, namely to the motivational dynamics of gains, value creation, recognition and reward.