Information & Communication Technologies (ICTs) in Higher Education: Factors Influencing Adoption and Diffusion by Students in Kenyan Universities

Recently, universities have been investing heavily on the provision of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) such as Internet bandwidth, E-mail, expensive e-learning platforms, administrative intranet, and library information systems, not only for use and access by all university students, but also, to create a competitive advantage. Despite these enormous investments and rapid ICTs deployment rates in universities, only a few studies mainly from the information technology (IT) and information systems (IS) literature have been devoted in uncovering the factors particularly those of the environmental context that influence the adoption and diffusion of new ICTs within an institutions’ students. Similarly, empirical studies regarding the predictability of ICTs diffusion in institutions of higher learning are strikingly limited. In an attempt to fill this research void, the present research examines the environmental, technological, organizational and individual factors that affect the adoption and diffusion of ICTs by students in public and private universities in a developing country -Kenya. This paper is part of an ongoing PhD. research, and presents findings on the interaction of the environmental factors with individual student’s decision on technology acceptance. A quantitative approach was used and data for this research was collected by means of a survey conducted in selected sample of public and private higher education institutions in Kenya in 2008. By testing a number of hypotheses using structural equation modelling (SEM), the authors conclude that the environmental context antecedents of ICTs diffusion have a significant and positive influence on ICTs assimilation by students. Among the results for this paper, competitive pressure, Government ICTs support, Industry/Vendor/ISPs ICTs support, and socioeconomic conditions had a positive influence on ICTs adoption and diffusion. This study, therefore has contributed by identifying some important environmental context antecedent factors that enhance ICTs adoption and diffusion and hence corrected the limitations of existing technology acceptance model (TAM)