STUDENTS’ ACCEPTANCE AND USE OF VIRTUAL CAMPUS IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN EMPIRICAL RESEARCH

Virtual Campus (VC) is one of the most common and widely used tools –within blended learning– in higher eduation, since it allows students to communicate with other members of the university community, facilitates administrative procedures and provides academic resources designed to support teaching and learning. Nevertheless, its development has not reached its peak yet and many students do not make a thorough use of these resources and on line learning.

This paper empirically analyses students’ perceptions and opinions about VC at a small Spanish university. We use the Tecnhnology Acceptance Model (TAM) as a general framework to investigate whether perceived ease of use of Virtual Campus, perceived usefulness, subjective norm and perceived control have a bearing on students’ attitude and actual use of such on line resources.

Analysis of survey data will indicate if the TAM model is applicable or not to the use of VC in Spanish higher education setting; will help us to better understand how students perceive and react to this methodology, and thus will help us to apply it more effectively.