Adoption of ICT-Based Teaching in Engineering: An Extended Technology Acceptance Model Perspective

Passive knowledge procurement in face-to-face learning is no longer the way education is imparted in higher education these days. Instead, new and developing Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are emerging as a promising paradigm for creating a profound change in digitizing education. It facilitates active learning with the enhancement in its delivery and how students grasp it by representing the shift from traditional desktop-as-a-platform towards the network-as-a-platform model. This paper proposes an extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) with ICT-based teaching and learning platform. TAM is the fundamental model to understand user perceptions and behavior towards potential acceptance or rejection of the technology. A mixed research methodology is adopted, comprising a series of survey questionnaires, evaluation of results, and the undergraduate student's performance in the collection of quantitative and qualitative data to measure the acceptance of the proposed research model. For the practical implication of the proposed research model, four groups of 300 students each or two programming courses: C++ and Java, were analyzed in two consecutive academic sessions in a controlled environment for lecture and laboratory classes. Series of statistical result analyses were performed and examined with hypothesized relationships to measure the desired outcome. It measures the impact on the following constructs: student interest, motivation, understanding, satisfaction, class attention and interaction, attendance, improve grades, and perception of pedagogical effect. Results show positive effects for identified research questions and hypotheses, helping students with the knowledge, understanding, and deep learning programming and debugging skills. The novelty of this research lies in extending the findings using real-time monitoring facilities to track student activities and progress, including frequency use and intention to use a technologically driven learning style. This study also addresses two main issues in existing literature (i) analyses and compares perspectives of both students and instructors (ii) determines and measures the impact and its acceptance of user perception and intention for the entire semester, not for a single point in time.