Adoption and Use of Educational Technology Tools by Marketing Students

Abstract

Changing trends in educational technology are one of the driving forces behind many of the new educational strategies Higher Education Institutions are introducing. These changes are frequently justified with the “digital native” nature of the current generation of students who have been surrounded by digital technology from the moment they were born and are expected to also feel comfortable to use and adopt technological tools for their learning purposes. There have been many studies trying to assess the veracity of this assumption, but we still do not have enough data to confirm or deny this willingness and aptitude or even assess if students benefit from a technologically supported approach to learning. More studies are therefore necessary, in particular in subject areas that are not so connected to the technology, like humanities, economics, and social sciences, where students cannot be expected to be so proficient in the use of those tools and therefore their technology adoption process might be dependent of other variables. This article intends to contribute to this effort by presenting a study that uses the UTAUT model to assess which variables influence the use and adoption of educational technologies’ tools by Higher Education Marketing students. The result showed that, for these students, Social Influence (or Social Factors) was the most relevant variable to determine their Behavioural Intention.