Abstract:

The Covid-19 pandemic which originated in China in early December 2019 rapidly widespread in almost the world and caused an urgent transformation in the education sector as in many social and economic sectors. Similar to other educational institutions which had to take a break from face-to-face education activities, all universities switched to the distance education model with the e-learning systems. This mandatory process also revealed the need for research and development studies required to successfully execute e-learning systems. In this sense, in addition to establishing the necessary technological infrastructure, it is important to understand the academicians' approaches and examine their attitudes towards the system, for the successful implementation of e-learning systems and the delivery of educational services with the expected quality and content. Therefore, this research aims to examine the factors that may affect the attitudes of academicians who actively use e-learning systems towards the use of the system. The research was conducted within the framework of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), and the basic model was expanded with different factors that present a versatile perspective at systemic, personal, occupational, and institutional levels. The study was carried out with 274 academicians working at Karadeniz Technical University, which has years of experience with the Distance Education and Application Centre within its structure. The research is expected to be a reference for other studies to be conducted on e-education services in the future and has evaluable results in increasing e-learning efficiency in universities.

Keywords: