Abstract:

Universities around the world are increasingly adopting learning management systems (LMS) to improve the outputs of the educational process and to invigorate their higher education environments. Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) has been used globally in research that looks at the acceptance of new technology (Davis, 1989; Venkatesh, 1996).

The Iraqi universities have faced a multitude of serious problems and weakness in the last three decades, not least the lack of access to modern, up-to-date Information and Communication Technology (ICT) facilities and training.

This paper looks for the factors influencing the acceptance of LMS software by the academic personnel in Iraqi universities. In this study, the survey questionnaires were administered to a sample of 40 faculty members at Al-Qadisiyah University, Iraq.

The survey questionnaire for this study is designed to determine IT faculty members’ perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and intention to use LMS tools using correlation coefficient. Questions in the survey were intended to answer the perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use of LMS, which are TAM constructs (e.g. Fathema and Sutton, 2013), as well as intention to use. The survey consists of binary questions to collect empirical data. The TAM survey is aimed to elicit responses about teaching using the online LMS. The relationships between the variables of perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and intention to use are measured by the TAM questionnaire.

The TAM is thus utilised minus ‘actual use’, which is included in the original model. The reason why the study excludes ‘actual use’ is because the learning management system is a new concept in Iraq (e.g. Elameer and Idrus, 2010a).

The aim of this paper is to analyse the LMS acceptance of faculty members of the University of Al-Qadisiyah using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM).

Keywords:

LMS (Learning Management System), TAM (Technology Acceptance Model).