Acceptance of Learning Management Systems: a perspective of Northern Nigerian Students.

Abstract

Access to the internet in developing countries is on the increase due to the declining cost of internet subscription and the availability of cheaper alternatives to internet-ready devices. This has ensured that most industries can leverage on technology advancements in order to improve their processes. In Nigeria however, there is a disparity between the way government-owned and private-owned industries use technology, while privately owned industries are funded (investment) to make profit, government-owned industries have been neglected. Higher education institutions are a good example of this disparity. Private universities have invested heavily in technological resources to provide value-for-money education; on the other hand public universities are faced with challenges resulting from inadequate funding. In higher education institutions, a very important technology is the learning management system (LMS) and prior research has shown that an LMS, when used prudently, has the potential to improve the instruction and learning process both in and out of the classroom. Till date, only a few of Nigerian universities have been able to implement a fully functional learning management system (LMS) and as a result, the present literature is devoid of research examining the factors that facilitate the acceptance of these eLearning systems by Nigerian students. Most of the studies have omitted critical factors such as instructors’ influence and course content and design quality; thus, there is no study that has been carried out in Nigeria that has comprehensively investigated the acceptance and use of LMS’. There is an abundance of studies on the acceptance of LMS’ in developed countries and these studies have identified factors that are responsible for influencing both instructors and students to use a LMS. However, this may not be applicable to developing countries where there is a significant difference in culture. This dissertation aims to fill this gap by the development and testing of a conceptual framework, which is derived from the socio-psychology domain. The framework is applied to investigate Nigerian university students’ acceptance and use of learning management systems and to compare the similarities and differences between public and private Nigerian university students’ acceptance and use of learning management systems. The universities in this study comprise of 2 (two) public and 2 (two) private universities located School of Information Technology and Computing Fall 2020 xi in northern Nigeria and a total of 1116 usable responses were received. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used test the research model and its associated hypotheses while multi-group analysis method was used to test the effect of the moderators and to compare the similarities and differences between the public and private university students use of LMS’. The findings showed that students from both private and public universities attribute their use of the LMS to the perceived ease of using (PEOU) the system, facilitating conditions (FC) and the influence of others (SI) to use the system. There was no support for the relationship between course quality (CQ) and the usefulness of the LMS in both student samples. Similarly, the relationship between learning value (LV) on BI in both student samples was not supported. Only the private university students attributed the usefulness (PU) of the systems as a determinant of their intention to use the system. The multi-group analysis results showed that age gender and experience have some effect on some of the relationships. The T-test analysis for the equality of the means was also carried out to determine if there are differences between public and private university students use of the LMS. The results indicated that indeed there are disparities in the use of LMS’s in both types of institutions. The results presented by this research contribute to existing literature by validating and supporting the conceptual model used in this study, which is based on prominent technology acceptance models, and provides several prominent implications to theory and practice for individuals and educational institutions.