An Empirical Investigation of the Course Website Acceptance Model (Cwam)

ABSTRACT There exists a plethora of technologies, including course websites that cater for the realization and expansion of eLearning in terms of its course-content delivery. Nevertheless, the technologies (i.e. course website) alone do not express the successful outcomes due to the implementation alone. Students' behavior and responses toward the technology (i.e. course website) will eventually determine whether the implementation is successful. Therefore, this paper seeks to highlight two important beliefs, i.e. perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness that has been widely applied to understand technology acceptance. More importantly, it remains the sole objective of this paper to validate the instrument of course website acceptance in a public institution of higher learning. Two main steps were involved in the validation of the instrument, which are 1) Exploratory validation of the initial R-type factor analysis and Cronbach Alpha reliability assessment, and 2) Confirmatory validation that includes convergent, discriminant and construct reliability assessment. The three constructs, i.e. course website usefulness, ease of use and usage were found to be just identified models that have sufficient regression weights. An item was dropped from course website usefulness, while three items each were dropped from the course website usefulness and ease of use constructs respectively. The findings suggest that the instrument that is in English might be the cause of these dropped items. I. INTRODUCTION The main contention of this paper is that eLearning tools do not ensure implementation success, let alone in promoting technology acceptance. Rather, students have to decide for themselves to embrace or behave receptively towards the course website that was intended to supplement their face-to-face classroom learning process. Nevertheless, the intention to accept or reject the course website is based on a series of tradeoffs between the perceived benefits of the course website and the complexity of learning (or using) it. This phenomenon can be reasonably explained by using the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), which essentially argues that social behavior, is motivated by an individual's attitude towards executing that behavior. Therefore, the change of behavior is the result of the function of one's beliefs about the outcome of the behavior and an evaluation of the value of each of those outcomes (Ji-Won Moon & Young-Gul Kim, 2001). The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) pioneered by Davis (1989) advances the TRA and suggests that perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEU) are key determinants that inevitably lead to the actual usage of the course website among students. PU is defined as the extent to which the student believes that using the course website would enhance his/her job performance. PEU on the other hand, is defined as the extent to which the student believes that using the course website would be free from effort (Davis et al., 1989). II. LITERATURE REVIEW Although TAM was influential in predicting and explaining technology acceptance in general, it lacks the specificity of users' opinions on specific system or technology (such as the course website). Due to this reason, researchers (e.g. Davis & Venkatesh, 1996; Venkatesh & Davis, 2000) pursued vigorous validation and extension of the TAM under different environments to increase its explanatory power. Additionally, a number of modified TAM models (e.g. Agarwal & Prasad, 1998; Chau, 1996; Chau & Hu, 2001 ; Horton, Buck, Waterson & Clegg, 2001 ; Hu, Chau, Sheng & Tarn, 1999; Igbaria, Zinatell, Cragg & Cavaye, 1997; Jiang, Shu, Klein & Lin, 2000) were developed to address acceptance of new technologies and their industrial application. Similarly in Malaysia, the advancement of the TAM is kept abreast with the latest development and diffusion of technologies in respective industries. …