Evaluate the Usefulness of Technology Tools in Teaching and Learning

Tags: Assessment, Evaluation, Flipboard, Mobile, Survey, TAM

Description

Research has shown that technology doesn’t really guarantee learning, but meaningful uses of technology can engage students but also improve learning (Kozma, 1994; Mayer, 2003). It is important to evaluate technology adoption practices for continuous improvement in teaching and learning.

The technology acceptance model (TAM) is a survey instrument that has been widely-used to investigate technology innovation adoption (Chen, Sivo, Seilhamer, Sugar & Mao, 2014). It examines users’ perceptions of usefulness, ease of use, attitudes and behavioral intention of the technology. The TAM survey can be easily adapted for evaluating different technologies in education, diagnosing strengths and weaknesses in the course of learning and identifying best practices to improve student performance.

Link to example artifact(s)

Professor: Steven Hornik, Accounting Instructor, Kenneth Dixon School of Accounting, UCF

Course title: ACG6415 – Advanced Accounting Information Systems

Professor Steven Hornik designed an assignment called “Security in the News.” For this assignment, students found articles related to a security breach that had occurred and collaboratively curated the articles into a course magazine using FlipBoard, an application where students can access via smart phone, tablet and computer.

At the end of the semester, he distributed a modified TAM survey to gauge students’ perception of their use of Flipboard in this assignment. The survey includes 24 Likert-scale (1 1=”Strongly Disagree”; 5=”Strongly Agree”) multiple-choice items derived from existing TAM instruments (Davis, 1989) to evaluate students’ perception of the usefulness, ease of use, attitudes and behavioral intention of Flipboard. The reliability measures of the survey constructs are between 0.711 and 0.845. The survey instrument used in this class can be downloaded at File:TAMSurvey.pdf.

The survey results indicated that students found the Flipboard app to be easy to use and useful for learning. In particular, they agreed that Flipboard helped foster a student-centered environment in class and recommended Flipboard be used in future classes. Students also made great suggestions for future learning activities in the survey.

Link to scholarly reference(s)

Chen, B., Sivo, S., Seilhamer, R., Sugar, A., & Mao, J. (2014). User acceptance of mobile technology: A campus-wide implementation of Mobile Learn application. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 49(3).

Davis, F. D. (1989). Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user acceptance of information technology. MIS Quarterly, 319–340.

Kozma, R. B. (1994). Will media influence learning? Reframing the debate. Educational Technology Research and Development, 42(2), 7-19

Mayer, R. E. (2003). The promise of multimedia learning: Using the same instructional design methods across different media. Learning and Instruction, 13(2), 125-139.

Citation

Chen, B., & Hornik, S. (2015). Evaluate the usefulness of technology tools in teaching and learning. In B. Chen & K. Thompson (Eds.), Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository. Orlando, FL: University of Central Florida Center for Distributed Learning. https://topr.online.ucf.edu/evaluate-the-usefulness-of-technology-tools-in-teaching-and-learning/?rev=4789.