Investigation of Factors that Influence the Adoption of the Web in E-Learning Environments

The research-in-progress investigates the relationship between technology acceptance, individual differences, organizational factors, and perceived risk in e-learning environments. It uses the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) as a basis for hypothesizing the effects of such variables on the use of Web technology as a knowledge transfer tool in the e-learning context. This study focuses on the usage behavior of instructors in universities. The contributions of this paper are four fold. First, this study may help identify eager users of new technologies for learning. Second, this paper is among the first to use the Technology Acceptance Model in the context of e-learning systems. Third, TAM has been mostly employed in environments where the user is presented with a finished system. In the case of e-learning, the user is an active participant who develops his/ her own systems for use. This will be among the first research into use of TAM to study acceptance of user-developed systems. Fourth, the paper integrates three situational factors: individual, organizational, and perceived risk, that have not been considered before in TAM literature