Investigating how teachers' background factors and self-perceptions of TPACK abilities affect their acceptance of online platforms in intermediate Lebanese schools

Abstract

Most school systems have been affected by the worldwide epidemic, requiring educators to use online platforms as technological tools to tackle the problem. However, the success of e-learning platforms is highly dependent on the acceptance and use of the technology by teachers. There is an increasing body of literature that focuses on understanding the factors that influence the adoption of e-learning systems to enhance the education experience. Over the past two decades, user acceptance models have been created, tested, amended, extended, and merged. These models have improved our understanding of user technology acceptance variables and their relationships. Nevertheless, there are some disputes and inconsistent results in the various studies of previous research, which rarely focus on the combined effect of these variables. In Lebanon, the transition to distance schooling happened fast due to the Covid-19 pandemic, so little research was available to inform future development. The present empirical quantitative study was conducted to gain a better understanding of the technological tools used, to investigate teachers' perceptions of the adoption of e-learning technologies, and to examine the combined impact of teachers' background factors and self-perceptions of their technology, pedagogy and content knowledge (TPACK) as additional external variables to the adapted technology acceptance model (TAM) on the perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEOU) of the tools within intermediate education during the pandemic. A survey was employed to examine teachers' backgrounds, self-perceptions of their TPACK abilities, and perceptions towards acceptance of information and communication technologies (ICT) used at the intermediate school level. The Cronbach's Alpha test was conducted to perform reliability checks of the survey items. The data used in the current analysis were collected from 104 intermediate school teachers working in 44 different private schools in one area in Lebanon. Statistical correlation and regression approaches were used to examine the relationships between teacher-related variables and their perceived level of ICT integration acceptance. The results show that Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams were the most used online platforms in Lebanese intermediate schools during the outbreak. Teachers' perceptions of the usefulness and ease of using online digital platforms are slightly above average for PU and PEOU. In addition, the majority of teachers in the sample rated their perceptions of knowledge in all TPACK domains as positive when it comes to the online resources they use for teaching and learning. The findings confirmed the critical role of teachers' self-perception of TPACK factors in determining their PU and PEOU of online platforms, with the influence of technology knowledge (TK) having the highest magnitude among the key determinants. The results also showed that age, particularly ABOVE50, was the only background factor that significantly affected teachers' PEOU of technology tools used. Implications of these findings for understanding and supporting effective technology integration in theory and practice and for future areas of research are discussed.