Session Information
16 SES 09 A, Net-based Community Building
Paper Session
Contribution
In a time characterized by an overload of information that is, through Internet, accessible for everybody, portal websites are useful as they bundle information that should be relevant for their users. Although the administrators are important, particularly for developing and maintaining the website, the real strength of a portal depends on the involvement and contributions of its’ members. So the aim of this study is to assess the members’ acceptance of a portal for education. The members will be grouped according to their extent of use (number of downloads, uploads and logins) of the portal, so that in the end guidelines can be proposed to promote the acceptance and use of the portal.
Also in the field of education where there is an increased use of technology in the classroom, leading to an increased need to stay up-to-date, not only for teachers, but also for anyone who is involved in the educational process (parents, student, school board members, etc.), portals can prove their value. KlasCement [http://www.klascement.net] is a portal for education targeted at the Dutch speaking part of Belgium. It is supported by the Flemish department of Education. Membership of KlasCement is free and unconditional, except that members have to login at least once a year. Through KlasCement, members can retrieve tutors, download and upload material (documents, media files, exercises, ...), follow the latest trends, evaluate posted material, and much more. At the time of writing, KlasCement had close to 57000 members and held over 11000 contributions. But what drives a member to contribute? In other words what drives a member to accept and use a portal?
In the field of research on technology acceptance, researchers try to identify the ultimate set of factors that gives the best prediction of technology acceptance. Hereto, a multitude of models and constructs were developed grounded on general social psychology and sociology theories. For this study, we will draw on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM; Davis, 1989) and the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB; Ajzen, 1991). Both these models are extensions of the Theory of Reasoned Action (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975), and they can be integrated into one model: C-TAM-TPB (Chau & Hu, 2001; Taylor & Todd, 1995a), containing the following scales:
- perceived usefulness (TAM): the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system would enhance his or her job performance (Davis, 1989)
- perceived ease of use (TAM): the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system would be free of effort (Davis, 1989)
- subjective norms (TPB): the person’s perception that most people who are important to him think he should or should not perform the behavior in question (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975)
- perceived behavioral control (TPB): perceptions of internal and external constraints on behavior (Taylor & Todd, 1995b)
- attitude (TAM & TPB): this reflects feelings of favorableness or unfavorableness towards performing a behavior (Taylor & Todd, 1995b). Attitude can be used both as a dependent (TAM) and independent variable (TPB).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Ajzen, I. (1991). The Theory of Planned Behavior. [Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes]. Organ Behav Hum Decis Process, 50, 179-211. Chau, P. Y. K., & Hu, P. J. H. (2001). Information technology acceptance by individual professionals: A model comparison approach. Decision Sciences, 32(4), 699-719. Davis, F. D. (1989). Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, and User Acceptance of Information Technology. Mis Quarterly, 13(3), 319-340. Fishbein, M., & Ajzen, I. (1975). Belief, Attitude, Intention and Behavior: An Introduction to Theory and Research. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Taylor, S., & Todd, P. A. (1995a). Assessing IT usage: The role of prior experience. Mis Quarterly, 19(4), 561-570. Taylor, S., & Todd, P. A. (1995b). Understanding Information Technology Usage - A Test of Competing Models. [Information Systems Research]. Information Systems Research, 6(2), 144-176.
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