Using the Technology Acceptance Model to Analyze the Learning Outcome of Open Education Resources

Along with the development of information and communications technology, open educational resources were widely applied in training usage. The use of these resources facilitates the access to knowledge by enabling learners to transcend time and space. In this way, learners are able to obtain new knowledge more actively and efficiently than before. Using Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) as the theoretical foundation, this study aims to explore the learning outcome of using open educational resources with the perceived convenience as the external variable. In this study, the open educational resources were defined as online courses on the Open Course Ware (OCW) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), on which the learners choose courses themselves and study without the impact from people, matters, time, space, and things with the help of the Internet. To achieve the objectives of the study, the researchers conducted a survey with the participants who had already used the open educational resources. In total, 124 valid samples were collected. The Partial Least Squares (PLS) statistical method was used to carry out the analysis. Overall, the model of this study has good prediction and explanatory power. After the data analysis, the study found that the perceived convenience exerts a positive impact on the use of the open educational resources. In addition, among the four TAM variables, the perceived usefulness does not exert a significant impact on the behavioral intention to use, but the other three TAM variables all have a significant impact on the behavioral intention.