Change Agents’ Required Expertise to Implement an Educational Technology: A Mixed-Method Study

Abstract

To support trainers in implementing emerging educational technologies into their practices, training centers nominate one or several change agents. The aim of this study is to identify their individual human factors in this organizational change process. Twenty-one experts in organizational change, training, and educational technology participated in this study that combined semi-structured interviews with two job analysis questionnaires. The data were first treated separately with descriptive statistics and directed content analysis. They were then analyzed jointly with a factorial correspondence analysis completed with a hierarchical ascending classification. Results highlight the core activity of a project manager and eight additional activities with their own individual human factors. They provide to the change agents’ team benefits, such as management, strategy, communication, training, analysis, facilitation, and technological, pedagogical, and financial expertise. Those findings suggest a protean activity of the change agent, hardly manageable by a single person, which practitioners should anticipate when managing change. This research also proposes an original method to obtain a deeper understanding of an unexplored concept like change agents.