Abstract:

The Internet offers many possibilities to the interested parties as a learning and teaching tool. Educational institutions have a growing interest in incorporating this tool into their traditional classroom instructions for the enhancement and their distance-learning programs for the online extensions. The results of the prior research shows that the most critical factor affecting the success of these efforts is the student’s acceptance of the Internet. Although the literature is full of theories aimed at explaining the individual technology acceptance in both mandatory and voluntary settings, there is no general agreement on how to specifically explain the Internet acceptance behavior. So, the purpose of this study is to develop and test a structured model predicting the students' acceptance of the Internet by unifying the different theories from the Information Technologies field. In this framework, a theoretical research model reflecting the relationships between perceived usefulness, ease of use, enjoyment, self-efficacy, facilitating conditions, technology anxiety, subjective norms and behavioral intentions is proposed. Explatory, confirmatory and SEM (Structural Equation Model) analysis are applied to examine the casual ordering in the research model by using data collected from 306 students. The results suggest that perceived usefulness, ease of use, enjoyment, technology anxiety and subjective norms are the important determinants of the students' Internet acceptance behaviors.

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