A Study on Moderating Effect of Gender, and Experience on Massive Open Online Courses (Moocs) Technology Adoption by Extending the Utaut Model With Reference to Student Mooc Users

Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are recent development in the online learning backdrop that has its heredity in the ever growing collection of Open Educational Resources (OER) and distance learning technologies. Dave Cormier coined the term Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in 2008 to illustrate the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (CCK08) course and emphasize the key features of this new pedagogical model. Despite of many advantages in adopting MOOCs, many research studies have indicated that majority of MOOC users discontinues the course whose intentions of users are not clearly known. Therefore, it has become crucial for service providers and policymakers to understand the factors affecting the MOOC technology adoption and also to explore the moderating effect of age and gender on the factors influencing MOOC adoption. The purpose of this research is to find the factors influencing the behavioural intention to adopt massive open online courses technology by extending the UTAUT model. The study was carried out taking a total of 168 college students who use MOOC as respondents and hence the sampling technique used was purposive sampling. The statistical tools used for analysis of the data are cross-tabulation, regression and for this SPSS software was used. The research indicated that that Performance Expectancy (PE), Effort expectancy (EE), Social Influence (SI), website quality (WQ), Self efficacy (SE) has significant influence on behavioural intension to use MOOC. However, very minimum moderating effect of gender and experience of the respondents was found on the factors influencing the behavioural intention to adopt MOOCs. The implication of this research is that the service providers get more light on the factors which influence the behavioural intention to use MOOCs and to understand the moderating effect of gender and experience on the factors which influence the behavioural intention to adopt Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).