Researching instructional use and the technology acceptation of learning management systems

This paper researches the technology acceptation of LMS by secondary school teachers, based on a conceptual acceptance model including: perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and subjective norm (traditional TAM2 components), personal innovativeness towards IT (Agarwal & Prasad, 1998), internal ICT support (Tondeur, Van Keer, van Braak, & Valcke, 2008), and experience (Sun & Zhang, 2006). In addition, we examine how secondary school teachers use LMS. We scrutinized LMS functionalities available and used by our target group when adopting one of the three most often used LMS: Dokeos, Blackboard, and Smartschool (De Smet & Schellens, 2009).

The following functionalities were included: document publishing (the teacher uploads documents such as presentations, course documents, video clips, etc.), announcements (the teachers send announcements or messages, that appear on the platform and/or are sent to the student’s mailbox), uploading or publishing exercises (equal to document publishing, but specifically for exercises), receiving student products (the student uploads documents to be downloaded by peers and/or the teacher), assessment modules (student assignments with the possibility to get feedback from teacher), chat (synchronous communication), learning path (road map for learners), forum (asynchronous communication environment), wiki (type of website, mostly powered by wiki software, that allows the creation of interlinked websites), agenda, reservations module (material or classrooms) and student tracking module (absences or grading).

Based on earlier research (Dabbagh & Bannan-Ritland, 2005; Dabbagh & Kitsantas, 2005; Lonn & Teasley, 2009) several types of LMS-use could be delineated. However, we mainly built on this context according to Hamuy and Galaz (2010) who differentiated between two types of LMS functionalities: ‘informational use’ versus ‘communicational use’. The ‘Informational’ level was defined by Hamuy and Galaz (2010) as “contents published by users in the LMS” (p. 171); the ‘Communicational’ level was defined as “the processes that foster the exchange of these contents between LMS users” (p. 171).

If you use the article as published in Computers & Education, please cite as:

De Smet, C., Bourgonjon, J., De Wever, B., Schellens, T., & Valcke, M. (2012).
Researching instructional use and the technology acceptation of learning management systems by secondary school teachers. Computers & Education, 58(2), 688-696.