Abstract:

Recent studies have confirmed significant deficiencies still exist in Sub-Saharan African education. In many of these countries, fewer that 3 out of 10 adults can read and write, and in others, less than 30% of children continue education beyond primary school. There are encouraging signs of improvement, such as an 8.7% increase in local college enrollment and an even greater increase in enrollment at overseas educational institutions. Technology-assisted learning, or e-learning, has the potential to further improve the state of education in Sub-Saharan Africa by enhancing and supporting the scarce educational resources. Unfortunately, new e-learning products and applications are often designed without considering developing countries’ realities, and fail to address the needs of disadvantaged community members. Educational gains are thus tempered by a lack of adoption of IT-enabled systems and e-learning products. Previous studies have been successful at using existing technology adoption models to help explain e-learning adoption by developed nations, but have not tackled the issue of adoption by developing Sub-Saharan African nations. This paper provides an analysis of existing technology acceptance models and relevant literature to identify key factors that may affect adoption of e-learning technology in Sub-Saharan Africa, and proposes a revised model for technology adoption that can account for peculiarities of developing countries’ requirements and constraints. This would aid in the rollout of this technology by identifying the most favourable environments for educators to implement e-learning in disadvantaged communities. It is expected that this approach can be generalized to provide a revised model for acceptance of any given technology across Sub-Saharan Africa

Keywords:

IT, e-learning, technology acceptance, UTAUT, TAM, Sub-Saharan, Africa.