Abstract:

The background of students in higher education is changing from the traditional middle class school-leaver to a complex mix of age, race, gender, ethnicity, socio-economics, and experience. This complexity of student needs, abilities, experience and expectations drives challenges for academic staff and administration as well as for students which already had great impacts on student performance. Even though learning technology is becoming pervasive, there is evidence suggesting that many students feel anxious about using Information Technology resources such as computers and the Internet. One of the major factors impacting the effective use of Learning Management System (LMS) in Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) is students’ anxiety on the use of LMS. Although much progress has been made in understanding impacts of anxiety, the process of technology adoption and the context under which this process may vary have not been investigated sufficiently in eLearning environment. In order to fill this knowledge gap, we attempt to develop a model to understand LMS usage, and overall satisfaction of using LMS. Furthermore, it deciphers how computer-related individual differences such as computer self-efficacy and computer anxiety impact the process of LMS usage. The analysis results from a survey of over 1000 online students show that our antecedents play key roles in student’s satisfaction of LMS usage. For online learning to be a successful learning technology, its design, implementation and evaluation must involve taking into consideration those social and equity issues that affect the performance of a changing user base. The model and its implications can help course designers improve their students’ level of satisfactions, and learning, thus achieve endurance and success for the online learning.

Keywords:

Anxiety, Self-Efficacy, Perceived Ease of Use, LMS and VLE.