Predicting the acceptance of MOOCs in a developing country: Application of task-technology fit model, social motivation, and self-determination theory

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2017.09.009Get rights and content

Highlights

  • First study with an integrative model to understand the acceptance of MOOCs.

  • The adoption of MOOCs, a paradigm shift, is highlighted in a developing country.

  • The moderating role of perceived reputation is investigated.

  • Perceived reputation moderates the relationship of BI and usage of MOOCs.

  • Insightful directions are presented for the researchers and practitioners.

Abstract

Online learning courses have expanded the educational landscape to distant and disadvantaged areas. Although such courses have generated extensive interest, there is as yet sparse literature evaluating the determinants of online course acceptance, especially in developing countries. Seeking to close this gap, this study examines the factors influencing students’ adoption of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in a developing country by applying an integrated framework incorporating the task-technology fit model, social motivation, and self-determination theory. In addition, the study investigates the moderating effect of perceived reputation on students’ adoption behavior. A self-administered survey was employed for data collection and valid responses from 414 participants were used for testing the proposed model. The data was analyzed using structural equation modeling through Smart-PLS. The results establish the significant contribution of task characteristics and technology characteristics in facilitating task-technology fit, and that the fit positively influences behavioral intentions. Moreover, social recognition, perceived competence, and perceived relatedness have positive and significant effects on the behavioral intentions of the students. This research also reveals that perceived reputation has an important moderating effect on the students’ usage behavior. The study results provide both practical and theoretical insights to enrich the understanding of the paradigm shift due to MOOCs and online education.

Introduction

Information and communication technologies have revolutionized all spectra of human life, especially educational discourse. The concurrent evolution of digital culture has been shaping education as a sociotechnical mechanism where the teachers and learners are mutually involved in the development and expansion of a digital model of education (Zhong et al., 2016). Formal education, a vital aspect of human life, has been increasingly shifting from black/white boards and offline courses to online learning platforms. The online courses provide convenience and timeliness to the students, allowing them to enroll and learn from anywhere at any time. To this end, the last decade has witnessed a steady growth of e-learning in academia (Mulder and Janssen, 2013), and a large number of teachers and higher education institutions have introduced Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in their areas of specialization. These courses are managed by platforms such as Coursera, edX, Udacity, MIT, and MiriadaX that can handle the large-scale enrollment of participants around the globe (Muñoz-Merino et al., 2015). A MOOC is defined as an online open-access course available to an unlimited number of learners from arbitrary locations (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2016). The MOOC platforms (edX, Coursera, Udacity, and the like) offer online courses in specialized areas, followed by short video lectures and automatic correction exercises to cover the subjects and fulfill the requirements of tests (Belanger and Thornton, 2013). Originating in major American and European universities, MOOCs have gained popularity throughout the world, especially for distance education (Aboshady et al., 2015, Bayne, 2015). Currently, some other platforms, like the Khan Academy, TED, and iTunes U, also participate in online teaching/learning pursuits by offering educational and other inspiring videos that attract many viewers (Sandeen, 2013). Initially, some of the world’s best universities delivered free Hollywood-type trailers to embed MOOCs deeper into higher education, establishing what is now considered as a pedagogical revolution in the academic sector (Pappano, 2012).

Learning through MOOCs features free education that does not lead to any formal college credit, except where a certificate may be offered. MOOCs represent a potentially stimulating opportunity to use technology to realize many of the long-promised benefits of universal higher education. The chief attraction of MOOCs is the free online learning including accessibility, affordability, and open enrollment for all (Freitas et al., 2015, St Clair et al., 2015). MOOCs integrate learning with virtual technology, allowing teachers and students to easily interact with each other to foster the learning process, with the potential to overcome issues of borders, race, gender, class, and income. Online learning provides teachers the opportunity to teach a large number of students throughout the world and enables students to connect to the best universities and best professors in the world, connections which can be very difficult and very costly to access physically (Alario-Hoyos et al., 2014, Wu and Chen, 2016). MOOCs are specifically important for those students who are geographically distant and have few opportunities for face-to-face classroom education, because online courses are not limited by borders, time zones, or geographic location (Kearney and Levine, 2015, McAuley et al., 2010).

Today, MOOCs are at a developing stage and the sponsors, commentators, and regulators are keenly interested to see them develop as an inexpensive and innovative method of interactive pedagogy and sophisticated delivery of educational content (Altbach, 2014). Along with the advantages, however, there are issues that impede the acceptance of MOOCs, one example being high non-completion rates that obscure the learning and teaching quality (Diver and Martinez, 2015). The prime concern being faced by MOOC providers is to keep students engaged in the online courses because some students are just interested in the learning experience rather than completing the courses to grasp the content (Chang et al., 2015). Although MOOCs provide an emerging form of education between the traditional online courses and formal learning (Walji et al., 2016), MOOC success requires continuing usage on the part of students to understand and assimilate the course material properly into their educational pursuits. As Huang et al. (2017) recently highlighted, the main issues with MOOCs are that many courses are started but students often leave a MOOC without completing the full course. Therefore, examining the factors affecting the students’ adoption of online courses is vital for the future of MOOCs and the educational development of developing countries.

The increasing development of MOOCs signifies their viability (Bhattacherjee and Premkumar, 2004) and sustainability (Barnes, 2011). However, scant research is available unveiling the factors that influence the adoption of MOOCs in developing countries. In this perspective, the first question is the relevance of MOOCs, that is, how they can meet the increasing demands of learners. The second aspect is the social perspective, taking into account that learners value recognition and are subject to social influence. This aspect is crucial for the adoption of MOOCs in any society. Accommodating these aspects in technology adoption studies, several researchers have integrated the Task-Technology Fit (TTF) model with social or psychological aspects of behavior (Lin and Huang, 2008, Terras and Ramsay, 2015, Wu and Chen, 2016). The third aspect is the learners’ self-motivation that explains how individuals accept any technology without external interference and how the elementary psychological needs lead to self-motivation for accelerating usage behavior. Adapting a simple model to suit the changing information technology environments would require modifications to cover all the aspects that appear in disparate technologies and situations. Considering this perspective, the relatively new integration of the TTF model, social motivation, and self-determination theory (SDT) is a plausible way to address the technology-oriented, social, and psychological needs of learners in the adoption of MOOCs. Nevertheless, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no existing studies cover the three views in an integrative way to probe the adoption of MOOCs in developing countries.

MOOCs can help raise the rate of e-learning in Pakistan. Students across the country are willing to enroll in MOOCs offered by prestigious institutions like Coursera, edX, and MIT. Pakistani MOOCs are not well developed; no local platforms provide diverse online courses to citizens throughout the country although local MOOCs do provide some limited e-learning service in Pakistan. For example, the Virtual University of Pakistan, Allama Iqbal Open University, and Latif Ebrahim Jamal National Science Information Center are providing a limited selection of MOOCs and online courses which help students learn practical skills that are not only beneficial as general education but also help learners to start their own businesses. Focusing on the technological and pedagogical limitations of MOOCs in the low- and middle-income countries, Abidi et al. (2016a) clarified that only one local MOOC was introduced in Pakistan in 2014 and one more in 2016. The overall educational statistics of Pakistan are not encouraging. The indicators are very low compared with developing countries although steady growth has been observed in the past several decades (http://moent.gov.pk/). One issue that is both a problem and an opportunity is that about 42% of Pakistan’s population is illiterate. The majority of the illiterate population is female because women have less opportunity for traditional education. Besides this, there is a wide gap in the educational indicators of urban areas versus rural areas and male versus female1. Formal education can be conveniently assisted through MOOCs, as stated by the former Chairman of Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan, Javed Jabbar: “They [MOOCs] represent an enormous leap in expanding access to information, knowledge, and education and reducing the vast disparities in the quality of professional capacity-building education that currently exists in Pakistan”2. In this scenario, it is quite understandable that the educational net needs to be accessible and available to all. MOOCs are one of the avenues through which the both urban students and rural students can be educated without formal enrollment in educational institutions in Pakistan.

There are a few studies that address MOOCs in Pakistan. For example, recently, Masud et al. (2016) investigated that whether web-based Continuing Medical Education (a MOOC) could be an alternative to the mandatory course requirements for physicians in Pakistan. They discussed the MOOC in the context of medical education to cover the credit requirements of the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council (PM&DC) for physicians and specialist doctors. In another study, Iqbal et al. (2016) discussed the status of MOOCs in Pakistan and held that despite the constraints of low literacy and lack of education, MOOCs have the potential to deliver education to the masses. Abidi et al. (2016b) assessed a MOOC that was designed as a three-week course on bioinformatics in the area of computer-based drug design. They found that learners were not very comfortable with the online course, yet concluded that there is a potential market for MOOCs in Pakistan. The pursuit of learning is in full swing in Pakistan and the lack of resources and limited access to the main cities and universities encourages successful adoption of MOOCs. The case of a young Pakistani girl (Khadijah Niazi) who took a MOOC at the age of 10 and completed the course at age 12 with distinction (Godwin-Jones, 2014), speaks loudly for MOOC adoption in developing countries, especially Pakistan. To sum up, there is a huge potential for MOOCs in Pakistan, yet there is no comprehensive study to model or explain the factors that influence the adoption of MOOCs.

The current study contributes to the literature in several ways. First, to the best of the authors’ information, this study is first to examine the adoption of MOOCs in the context of a developing Asian country, specifically, Pakistan. Socioeconomic challenges abound in Pakistan, including population overgrowth, poverty, shortage of clean drinking water, power crises, and lack of provision of education facilities, especially in the far-flung areas (Asrar-ul-Haq et al., 2016). MOOC providers can use the results of this study to help potential learners connect to the best courses of top-ranking universities, despite the aforementioned challenges. The low-income and middle-income countries especially need to assimilate online learning due to their financial constraints (Abidi et al., 2016a). Besides this, most of the studies on MOOCs focus on developed countries and investigate the learners’ continuance (Waldrop, 2014), so this study is more appealing in the educational context of a less-developed economy. Secondly, the study uses the TTF model in the context of online learning and provides additional empirical evidence from an Asian country. The study also evaluates the effects of social motivation, which highlights the social aspect of online learning behavior. Thirdly, unlike the previous studies that focused on the users’ extrinsic motivation (e.g. TAM, UTAUT), this study examines the effects of intrinsic psychological motivations (competence, relatedness, and autonomy) to investigate student acceptance of MOOCs through the framework of SDT, a view that has been overlooked in the previous research (Hew and Kadir, 2016b). The students’ inclination towards a unified sense of self through meeting their psychological needs will make them more attached to the MOOCs for their learning purposes. The perspective of SDT is definitely important due to the students’ personal well-being when their motivation is internalized and is in close alignment with their self. In this perspective, the SDT is quite reasonable to investigate the adoption of MOOCs in a developing country (Pakistan) as it helps introduce motivational variables into technology acceptance in an educational context. Finally, perceived reputation was included as a moderating variable to evaluate its impact on the adoption of MOOCs because the reputation of MOOCs, although unequivocally vital for the adoption, has not been explicitly examined in this context before (Alraimi et al., 2015). Additionally, the study controls for education, age, and gender to ensure that the model’s results were not affected adversely by covariance.

Section snippets

Literature Review and hypotheses development

Higher education has undergone a paradigm shift because of online courses and convenient online access to the standard curriculum of many educational institutions. The digital revolution has helped students get easy access to online courses without any constraints of space or time (Pappano, 2012). Several researchers argue that (online) learning is a continuous process of information and resource development that applies to and solves real life problems (Anderson and Dron, 2010, Downes, 2008,

Data collection and sample characteristics

The unit of analysis is the individual use of MOOCs in online learning, so this study employed an adapted questionnaire to test the proposed model. Using a convenience sampling technique, the data was collected from January to March 2016 in the capital city of Pakistan (Islamabad) through a structured self-administered questionnaire. Convenience sampling is an appropriate sampling technique by the virtue of the researcher’s accessibility to the participants (Saunders, 2011). The study targeted

Results

To test the proposed hypotheses, this study used structural equation modeling (SEM) through partial least squares (PLS). PLS allows researchers to analyze the associations among theoretical constructs and measures the model in terms of reliability and validity (Hair et al., 1998). In this regard, Smart-PLS software is a convenient and reliable way to handle the formative measures and moderating effects (Barnes, 2011). Therefore, Smart-PLS (3) was used to evaluate the relationships in the

Discussion and conclusion

MOOCs have revolutionized teaching and learning by offering, through ICT and connectivity, a viable alternative to traditional classroom education. Interactive technology and the digital environment enable MOOCs to engage students in a new form of learning collaboration. Given the high cost of education and the accessibility problem, MOOCs represent a practical alternative model of learning. The current study gives insightful findings for future research and practice. Consistent with the

Limitation and future direction

The authors acknowledge several limitations of the study. The first issue is the survey design: by its nature, the cross-sectional study used limits the determination of causality. Although this study accounts for 64% of the variance in the intention to use MOOCs, the remaining variance may be due to other factors that this study did not include. Other constructs may be necessary to understand the students’ intentions thoroughly. Similarly, future research could focus on a longitudinal study

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