Title: An empirical study on users' adoption of MOOCs from the perspective of the institutional theory

Authors: Shang Gao; Yuhao Yang

Addresses: School of Business, Örebro University, SE-701 82, Örebro, Sweden ' School of Business Administration, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, East Lake High-Tech Development Zone, Wuhan, China

Abstract: MOOC, which stands for massive open online course, has attracted millions of users around the world and it has a promise to be a very important element of future education. However, there is a little research on users' adoption of MOOCs. This paper aims to improve the understanding of users' behaviour intention to use MOOCs. The proposed research model is an extension of technology acceptance model with three factors from the institutional theory. And an empirical study with 279 subjects was conducted to test this model in China. The results indicate that both perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use directly affect users' behaviour intention to use MOOCs significantly. Another interesting finding is that mimetic pressures also have a significant positive influence on users' behaviour intention to use MOOCs.

Keywords: massive open online courses; MOOCs; user adoption; technology acceptance model; TAM; institutional theory; behavioural intention; user behaviour; intention to use; perceived usefulness; perceived ease of use; mimetic pressure; e-learning; online learning; electronic learning.

DOI: 10.1504/IJNVO.2016.081654

International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations, 2016 Vol.16 No.4, pp.377 - 388

Received: 03 Nov 2015
Accepted: 17 Feb 2016
Published online: 19 Jan 2017 *

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