Factors affecting adoption of a student portal

Abstract: In a study it was found that only 16% of IT projects in UK were considered successful (Al-Tameem et al, 2008). Underestimating IT adoption problems when implementing a project has been recognized as one of the reasons for the failures (Fink, 1998). The current research aims to study adoption by students of a new portal implemented in Lund University School of Economics and Management (LUSEM). Quantitative method was used in order to answer the questions “Which are the factors significantly influenced the adoption” and “What are the extents of the influence”. The measurement constructs were adopted from Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) introduced by Davis (1989) and Extension of TAM presented by Dasgupta et al (2002) by including Accessibility as additional sub-dimension of Perceived Usefulness (PU), thus final model contained Accessibility, Collaboration and Document Exchange. The constructs were measured by means of electronic survey distributed among 432 students who used the new portal with 24% response ratio. A path analysis has been conducted for data processing which results led to the conclusion that Accessibility had a major impact on Behavioral Intention of students to use new portal followed by Perceived Ease of Use, Collaboration and Document Exchange. Another conclusion is that influence of Perceived Ease of Use of the portal to the Perceived Usefulness is not significant in contrast to the finding in the original TAM.