During the past two decades there have been significant changes in the landscape for higher education. Among these was a trend for universities and colleges to respond by adopting a more market-driven approach, leading to the introduction of new public management within universities and colleges, which led to the emergence of tensions between the academic and quasi business aims. In 2004 the UK government changed the criteria for the grant of degree-awarding powers and university title opening up the possibility for non-public organisations to apply. This thesis presents the case study of a private sector for-profit organisation as it introduced a more robust quality assurance infrastructure during the application process for taught degree-awarding powers. The analysis is undertaken within a conceptual framework developed from institutional and agency theory. The need to demonstrate legitimacy and the influence of key groups played a large part in the changes made. Using data collected via participant observation, key informant interviews and documentary evidence, the study examines the changes and management actions that took place during the period between June 2004 and July 2009 in order to identify the strategies that were adopted to manage the tensions between the academic standards and the commercial imperative of meeting shareholder expectations. The study contributes to the literature covering change in educational institutions and in particular that which reports on the introduction of a more business-oriented approach to the management of universities. The study is able to bring a new perspective to studying the management of tensions between academic and business aims by looking at the issues from an alternative angle. The key strategy developed was a gradual rationalisation of the academic aims within the business aims such that the duality of aims was diminished.

This study aimed to investigate the factors affecting faculty intention to use course management systems (CMS). The study was conducted in a private university with a mixed-method approach. First, 260 responses to a questionnaire was analysed by using structural equation modeling technique in order to examine the provided model. Second, interviews with selected 14 faculty members were conducted to understand the interrelationships. The findings indicated that, faculty intention to use CMS is mostly related with seeing value in using CMS including both personal and task/course related issues. In addition, the use of CMS should be perceived as easy which is directly influenced by the computer self-efficacy of the instructors. Discrimination of perceived personal benefits and task/course related usefulness is found to be important. Course/task related perceived usefulness is found to be weak without perceiving them personally beneficial. Availability of training and support is found to be weakly related to initial intention, however it appeared as an important variable for continuing to use CMS. &lsquo / Communicating the vision through leadership&rsquo / , &lsquo / promoting CMS&rsquo / , and &lsquo / sharing experiences and real life examples&rsquo / emerged as powerful approaches to facilitate use of CMS. Institutional policies regarding issues like &lsquo / academic freedom&rsquo / should be considered carefully while supporting the use of CMS. Moreover, to support institutional change it is important to be aware of the existence of different faculty profiles, which should be considered separately in relevant decisions.

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