| Abstrakt: |
In higher-education institutions, course management systems (CMS) seem to be one of the critical technologies. Today, there are many alternative CMSs, which provide infrastructure to start implementation and to support management of blended or online courses. There are different factors affecting the adoption of technology in both individual and institutional settings. It is obvious that different mechanisms and policies are needed to support individual and institutional adoption of CMSs. These varying aspects related to use of CMS can be discussed from student perspective, course perspective, teaching perspective, departmental perspective or from the university management perspective. From the perspective of the institutional use of CMSs, the position of teachers is believed to be very crucial for the meaningful adoption of CMSs. In order to support the adoption in higher-education institutions, it is important to understand the needs and forces which drive the initial start of CMS use by the teachers. This study aims to investigate the factors affecting the faculty intention to use course management systems (CMS). The study was conducted in a private university to test the provided model which is developed through utilization of the technology acceptance model (TAM). In addition to the core factors of TAM, "computer self-efficacy" as a well-known external variable and two new constructs "availability of training and support" and "perceived personal benefit" constructs were added to the model through a careful selection process. The model developed was tested through 260 responses given to survey study. In order to examine the provided model, these data were analyzed using the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique. The findings indicated that, faculty intention to use CMS is mostly related with seeing a value in use of it, which includes both personal and task/course-related issues. Additionally, the use of a CMS should be perceived as easy, which is directly influenced by the computer self-efficacy of the instructors. In this study, discrimination of perceived personal benefits and task/course-related usefulness is found to be important. The results gathered from the analysis of the collected data show that; (1) the task/course-related perceived usefulness is found to be weak without perceiving them personally beneficial, (2) availability of training and support is found to be weakly related to initial intention; however, it appeared as an important variable for continuing to use CMS. Furthermore, it is important to underline that differences in the teachers profiles, institutional policies or organizational infrastructures may have direct and indirect effects on the examined factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
