Abstract:

In general, the newly introduced innovative creations and ideas may not be easily accepted by a group of people. Therefore, the promotion of innovation is necessary to be implemented to deal with the mentioned problem. The researcher views that it is important to study the development of technology in parallel with its HR development, particularly in technology-related areas, because the huge investment on technology would be pointless if users do not accept to use it.

This research is to learn about the acceptance of technology supporting mobile learning on 3G wireless network system of Mahidol University International College (MUIC) instructors, and to determine the correlation between personal factors and the mentioned acceptance, by using survey forms create by the researcher to collect data from 115 MUIC instructors in 2011. Ninety-three survey forms were collected and then analyzed to determine the statistics which would be used to determine the Pearson product-moment coefficient correlation and to test the significance of the correlation coefficient with t-test by using a statistical processing program.

The results showed that MUIC instructors generally accepted technology supporting m-Learning on the 3G wireless network at an average level although instructors from some program divisions had a low acceptance level. In terms of the results from the 55 lists on usage activities of technology supporting m-Learning on 3G wireless network system, it is found that there are 13 activities which are being used by the majority of the sample group to support their instructions; while there are 42 activities that are not being used and have never been used before. Considering only 23 activities which can be effectively used solely on 3G network, it is found that only 6 of them are being used to support the instructional activities; while the other 17 are not being used. For the hypothesis test result in terms of the relationship between MUIC instructors’ individual factors and their acceptance score on technology supporting m-Learning, it is found that there is a significant relationship between program division of each instructors and their acceptance score of technology supporting m-Learning is at the level of 0.05 in statistically significance. However, it is also found that there is no significant relationship between genders, age ranges, or teaching experiences of MUIC instructors and the acceptance score of technology supporting m-Learning.
Considering the correlation coefficient (r) of program division, the acceptance score of technology supporting m-Learning has a positive relationship with the Fine and Applied Arts division, Science division, Business Administration, and the Centre of Preparation of Languages and Mathematics, which has statistically significance at the level of 0.05 and has correlation coefficient of 0.206, 0.209, 0.170, and 0.180 respectively. To sum up, this research result concludes that there are more than 60 percent of instructors in each program division who are interested in requesting the Audio Visual Department to develop their existed instructional media into multimedia which can be compatible with m-Learning, or interested to create more new multimedia for MUIC’s m-Learning system.

Keywords:

Acceptance of Technology, Educational Technology, Diffusion of innovation, Mobile Learning.