Paper Info
Title
The VLAB OER Experience: Modeling Potential-Adopter Student Acceptance
Abstract
Virtual Labs (VLAB) is a multi-institutional Open Educational Resources (OER) initiative, exclusively focused on lab experiments for engineering education. This project envisages building a large OER repository, containing over 1650 virtual experiments mapped to the engineering curriculum. The introduction of VLAB is a paradigm shift in an educational system that is slow to change. Treating VLAB OER as an educational technology innovation, its adoption by potential-adopter engineering students (N=131) is modeled based on Roger's theory of perceived attributes. Regression and factor analysis were used to analyze the data. Results indicate that the attributes of Compatibility, Ease of Use, Relative Advantage, and Trialability significantly influence potential-adopter students' intention to adopt an innovation like VLAB. The study also observed that using OER (such as VLAB) on desktops and low-cost tablets had similar effects in student performance to using physical labs. This has interesting implications for education policy-makers who are looking to reduce the digital divide.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1109/TE.2013.2294152
IEEE Trans. Education
Keywords
DocType
Volume
tablets,engineering education,VLAB OER experience,educational technology,regression analysis,virtual lab,open educational resources,student experiments,Virtual Labs,potential-adopter student acceptance,innovation management,Roger theory,simulation,innovation,engineering curriculum,Open Educational Resources (OER),factor analysis,Experiments
Journal
57
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
4
0018-9359
6
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.79
5
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Raghu Raman1299.66
Krishnashree Achuthan26824.70
Prema Nedungadi33313.10
Shyam Diwakar44418.20
Ranjan Bose519932.06