Assessing Technology Adoption at a University of Technology: A Case Study of Electronic Response Systems

Technology adoption is defined as accepting and using a new technology in order to improve delivery, service or performance. One such new technology is an electronic responsive system, called clickers. One of the advantages of clickers is to help passive students become more actively engaged with course material during classroom time while helping academics to monitor student learning. Despite the advantages of using clickers in education, some academics fail to adopt this new technology into their teaching practice. The purpose of the paper is to establish factors that may influence academics to adopt the use of clickers at universities of technology. A non-experimental research design incorporating a descriptive case study with quantitative data is used with convenient sampling. Sixty academics from a specific university completed a questionnaire that was structured using the four main constructs of Venkatesh's Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology model. Statistical results suggest that there is a strong relationship between Performance Expectancy, Effort Expectancy and Facilitating Conditions towards the use of clickers. Social influence has a moderate relationship in this regard. The results also indicate that age; experience or gender play no significant role in the adoption of such a system. Based on these results, there is a need to create awareness among all academics, irrespective of their age, experience or gender, of the importance of adopting clickers in their teaching practice to further student learning.