Mobile Learning Adoption: A Systematic Review of the Technology Acceptance Model from 2017 to 2020

Abstract

Numerous review studies were conducted in the past to understand the applicability of the technology acceptance model (TAM) in m-learning context by examining several issues. Although each of those studies provided a valuable synthesis of TAM, further issues are still uncovered and call for further research. Therefore, this research aims to systematically review the existing TAM-based m-learning studies through the analysis of various issues, including the factors affecting the m-learning adoption, research methods, TAM progress over publication years, online databases, active countries, and sample size. Out of 458 articles collected, a total of 64 studies published between 2017 and 2020 were critically analyzed. The main results indicated that self-efficacy is the most frequent factor affecting the m-learning adoption, followed by subjective norm, enjoyment, mobile anxiety, facilitating conditions, social influence, innovativeness, and satisfaction, respectively. Additionally, most of the analyzed studies have relied on questionnaire surveys in collecting their empirical data. Although it was developed in 1989, the results showed that the number of TAM-based m-learning studies is increasing year by year, which in turn, increases the credibility of the model in explaining the users’ intentions towards technology adoption. We have also discussed the contributions of this systematic review and the implications that it could yield for future attempts.