Understanding Educational Administrators’ Subjective Norms on Their Use Intention toward On-Line Learning

Abstract

With the rapid growth of the Internet, it is much easier to access the web-based technology. The web-based technology has also dramatically influenced our life. Moreover, many institutions, including the government of Taiwan, required that their employees are capable of using technological tools to fulfill their job requirements. Public organizations in Taiwan are now widely utilizing web-based learning techniques to improve the quality of human capital and boost the productivities of public employees; the situation is the same in education field. Many previous studies showed that using the web-based technology efficiently enhances learners’ performances, attitudes and motivation toward on-line learning. Therefore, with the trend of using web-based technology on learning and teaching, numerous education/training institutes and companies have dedicated great efforts and large amount of money to advance on-line learning programs for users. However, while many studies mentioned about the learners’, teachers’ and employees’ acceptance toward on-line learning, few studies have reported the point of view from educational administrators, the crucial group of people who make the educational decisions. Therefore, the purposes of this study are using the theory of planned behavior and theory of reasoned action as background models to investigate the effect of the participants’ subjective norms on their use intention toward on-line learning. The participants in this study were 176 educational administrators in Department of Education, Taipei City Government. A survey questionnaire was administered to understand their subjective norms, including “superior influence,” “peer influence,” and “regulations.” The results demonstrate that peer influence has the most significant effects on participants’ use intention, followed by superior influence. However, regulations have no significant effect on their use intention. Specifically, from the results of correlation analysis, there is a positive relationship between peer influence and their use intention toward on-line learning, however, a negative relationship has shown between superior influence and use intention toward on-line learning. In other words, it seems that the participants are influenced by their peers on using on-line learning, thus expressing higher use intention. Contrary to the peer influence, the participants are less influenced or get discouraged by their superiors on using on-line learning.