Examining the Acceptance of E-Learning Systems During the Pandemic: The Role of Compatibility, Enjoyment and Anxiety

Abstract

Increasing the quality of education with the use of technology has been one of the main goals of education for many years. In this direction, e-learning systems have attracted great interest from higher education institutions and large-scale investments have been made in these systems. The transition to online education worldwide with the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic has made e-learning systems much more critical. At this point, students' elearning systems acceptance have assumed a vital role for the success of online education. Thus, the purpose of this study is to determine the factors that affect the intention of university students to use e-learning systems, to examine the relationships between factors and to verify an extended technology acceptance model for higher education. The data were collected from 1709 university students studying online. The data of the study, in which the structural equation modeling method was adopted, was analyzed with PLS-SEM technique. According to the analysis results, the developed model explains 76.2% of the intention, 67.9% of the perceived usefulness and 62.9% of the perceived ease of use. In addition, 11 of the 12 proposed hypotheses were supported. The only relationship that is not significant belongs to perceived usefulness, which is a very important determinant in the context of technology adoption. Compatibility had the greatest effect on intention, and all relationships related to the emotion based constructs were found to be significant. The findings of the study are valuable in terms of better understanding the e-learning system use of university students during the pandemic.

Keywords

• E-learning
• technology acceptance
• higher education
• university students
• TAM
• PLS-SEM
• E-learning, technology acceptance, higher education, university students, TAM, PLS-SEM