Technology and Social Media Usage in Higher Education: The Influence of Individual Innovativeness

Abstract

This article presents a two-phase study exploring the usage of technology in higher education as well as the role of the general innovativeness in predicting the actual use of technology. During the first phase of the study, which involved 502 staff members, a descriptive analysis of their usage of social media, technological devices, and Microsoft Office 365 cloud services was performed, with various demographic variables being considered. During the second phase, which involved a subsample of 106 staff members, structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to examine a model in which the general innovativeness and the demographic variables acted as predictors of the actualized innovativeness. The results showed that the staff used social media, devices, and cloud services quite satisfactorily. The examination of their user profiles revealed that there were significant differences among the staff members on the basis of their demographic variables, especially their gender, job type, and discipline. The results of the SEM showed that the general innovativeness contributed positively, as was expected, to predicting the adoption of devices, non-academic social networking sites and Office 365 cloud services. The results further suggested that males were early adopters of devices, while academics were early adopters of commercial services and academic social networking sites. However, the academics appeared to lag behind the administrators in terms of adopting Office 365 cloud services. The implications of the study and directions for future research are also presented.