An Empirical Study of Technology Acceptance in Higher Education during Covid-19 Pandemic

Information technologies provide various advantages to compete in global markets. More businesses adopt these technologies to gain competitive advantages such as quick market response, fast and reliable supply chains, quick decision based on big data. It is a challenging process to acquire a new technology and there are different factors that affect the acceptance speed of a technology. The effects of some factors may vary due to various reasons such as natural disasters, economic crises, market structure. Since the beginning of 2020, Covid-19 pandemic caused many different businesses and supply chain to adapt new conditions. Higher education industry is one of the profoundly affected sectors from pandemic and it is forced to shift rapidly from traditional teaching to online teaching. This study aims to investigate the possible effects of self-efficacy, user experience, innovativeness, usefulness, ease of use and intention on acceptance of distance education systems under Covid-19 pandemic conditions. The study is conducted at Ardahan University, Turkey with 598 of students. The hypotheses were tested using PLS-SEM (Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling). Findings reveal that self-efficacy and innovativeness have effects on perceived ease of use while self-efficacy and user experience do not have positive impact on perceived usefulness. Results also revealed that perceived ease of use has positive impacts on perceived usefulness, and perceived usefulness has positive impact on intention.