DIGITAL LIBRARY
RESEARCHER’S PERCEPTION OF ADOPTION OF UBIQUITOUS LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES
American University of Sharjah (UNITED ARAB EMIRATES)
About this paper:
Appears in: INTED2013 Proceedings
Publication year: 2013
Pages: 473-481
ISBN: 978-84-616-2661-8
ISSN: 2340-1079
Conference name: 7th International Technology, Education and Development Conference
Dates: 4-5 March, 2013
Location: Valencia, Spain
Abstract:
The emergence of ubiquitous learning technologies (u-learning) has held a great promise for a shift towards a fundamentally new type of learning. U-learning technologies enable the learning process to happen anywhere, any time for students [1]. While u-learning technologies have the potential to improve the learning process by making it more pervasive, interactive, and seamless, somehow the technology has not been adopted within education community as was perhaps expected [2]. Therefore, development of an understanding of factors that have led to adoption (or non-adoption) of ubiquitous learning technologies is a key research task. Once these factors are understood, features of this technology and adoption strategies can perhaps be modified in such a manner as to become more aligned with users’ requirements and to increase the adoption rate. This paper presents an exploratory study aimed at isolating the factors underlying the adoption of ubiquitous learning technologies. This study is limited to include teachers, students, and administrators as the key stakeholders in the adoption of ubiquitous learning technology. In order to achieve this objective, Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model was modified for each stakeholder [3] and three different adoption models were proposed. Several additional adoption factors, such as culture and system characteristics [4-6], which may affect the adoption behavior of each user group, were also added to each of the three adoption models. After developing a modified adoption model for each user group, a survey of key researchers in the field of ubiquitous learning was designed and conducted to determine their stance on why the various stakeholders would or would not adopt their ubiquitous learning technologies. The paper presents an analysis of the responses to the survey and isolates the factors which had a greater impact on each user group’s adoption behavior. By detecting the most affective factors on each stakeholder’s adoption behavior, researchers will have a better idea of the factors on which they must focus more while developing and deploying their u-learning system.

References:
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Keywords:
u-learning, ubiquitous learning, UTAUT adoption model.