An Empirical Assessment of a Technology Acceptance Model for Apps in Medical Education

Abstract

The evolution and the growth of mobile applications ("apps") in our society is a reality. This general trend is still upward and the app use has also penetrated the medical education community. However, there is a lot of unawareness of the students' and professionals' point of view about introducing "apps" within Medical School curriculum. The aim of this research is to design, implement and verify that the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) can be employed to measure and explain the acceptance of mobile technology and "apps" within Medical Education. The methodology was based on a survey distributed to students and medical professionals from University of Salamanca. This model explains 46.7% of behavioral intention to use mobile devise or "apps" for learning and will help us to justify and understand the current situation of introducing "apps" into the Medical School curriculum.

Learning with mobile technologies – Students’ behavior

“…These hypothesis were based on the previous findings of other researchers (Briz- Ponce & García-Peñalvo, 2015;Venkatesh et al, 2003;Zayim & Ozel, 2015).…”

“…This Organization has affirmed that m-learning has a great potential in the quality of learning and enhancing the good student's results (UNESCO, 2009). The drivers that could influence in students' behaviour to use mobile technologies for learning, have been considered an engaging factor to assay in many researches (Arteaga, Duarte, & García, 2013;Briz-Ponce & García-Peñalvo, 2015;Chen, 2011;Hong, Thong, & Tam, 2006;Lee & Lehto, 2013;S anchez & Hueros, 2010;Sezer, 2016;Thakre & Thakre, 2015).…”

“…Briz- Ponce and García-Peñalvo (2015) makes a description of a TAM model applied to medical students making a confirmatory factorial analysis in order to explain the relationship between the dimensions included in the study. Lee and Lehto (2013) makes a research based on a TAM model as well reporting the determinants that may influence in the behavioural intention to use new technologies.…”

Effects of Mobile Learning in Medical Education: A Counterfactual Evaluation

“…There are some studies that investigate about the trends of mobile learning [10], the perception of students or teachers [11][12][13][14], their challenges [11,15,16], benefits [11,17,18] but there are few of them related with the real impact of mobile learning [19][20][21][22].…”

¿Utilizarán los futuros docentes las tecnologías móviles? Validación de una propuesta de modelo TAM extendido

“…Aplicado en numerosos ámbitos (Ariff, Yeow y Zakuan, 2014;Briz-Ponce y García-Peñalvo, 2015), se modifica frecuentemente añadiendo constructos de otras teorías como la TTF (Task Technology Fit) (Ma, Chao y Cheng, 2013) o la IDT (Innovation Diffusion Theory) (Lee, Hsieh y Hsu, 2011). También, con el tiempo, el modelo TAM ha ido incorporando algunos de los hallazgos de estas investigaciones generándose dos versiones del modelo el TAM2 (Venkatesh y Davis, 2000) y el TAM3 (Venkatesh y Bala, 2008), que plantean nuevos constructos y relaciones, aunque también incrementan la complejidad del modelo.…”