Abstract:

The use of open educational resources (OERs) is now a global movement. The educators ' acceptance of OERs is critical to implementing OERs in teaching and learning. However, only some studies have examined the extension of the technology acceptance model (TAM) of OERs by incorporating external factors. This study aims to determine the factors that affect faculty members’ acceptance of OER use by applying a model incorporating TAM as the theoretical basis for the hypotheses. This study utilized a quantitative research approach with a cross-sectional survey to examine the proposed model. The methodology comports with the latest relevant empirical research in technology acceptance. The authors of this study chose a quantitative research approach to determine the relationship between or among each variable in Davis's (1989) TAM and faculty member intentions to adopt OERs. A total of 194 faculty members from the College of Education at King Khalid University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, participated in the study. Data were collected via a self-administered online questionnaire. The results satisfy all of the requirements for regression analysis. The statistical analysis of the research data both theoretically and empirically support the proposition that Davis's (1989) TAM is a suitable theoretical framework for better under understanding and predicting teacher intentions to use technologies. The data show that the proposed research model effectively explains contributing factors affecting the intention to use OERs in higher education. Additionally, the model explains a high percentage of the variance of two core variables from Davis's (1989) TAM, namely 70% of the variance of behavioral intentions (INT) and 57% of perceived usefulness (PU). This variance is significantly higher than that set forth in the original TAM (40% to 50%), according to Davis (1989). The variances for PU, perceived ease of use (PE), attitudes (AT), and influence INT were respectively .466, .453, .571, and .695; furthermore, R2 dropped from .695 in INT to .453 in PE.

Keywords:

Open educational resources, Extended TAM, faculty members, acceptance model, Saudi universities.