Toward a Model for E-learning Recommender System Adoption: a Pilot Study

Over the past decade universities all over the world have realized the value of providing educational information and services electronically. With this growing interest in e-learning, the question of how to increase learner's adoption and usage of e-learning services including recommender systems has been raised. In order to facilitate students' adoption and use the e-learning service channel, educational institutions and e-learning researchers need to understand factors that influence students' adoption and usage of e-learning recommender systems. Grounded in the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) framework, this paper develops a unique conceptual model by integrating the TAM with a set of new factors identified in the literature: user experience and service quality. The revised TAM model developed in this paper is to study, at a later stage, the impact of these factors on students' adoption of e-learning recommender systems in developing countries. As part of a larger research project, this paper reports the survey instrument development and validation in the field. We administered a survey instrument to a sample of 75 students randomly chosen from university students in Saudi Arabia. Although the sample was small, it indicates that the reliability of the scales is within an acceptable range and it can be used to test the main study hypotheses.