Motivating Factors for Faculty to Use Web Applications in Education

The social nature of Web applications have the potential to empower education. These applications provide a learning environment in which students can construct their learning, collaborate with others, generate ideas, edit and distribute their material, and more. The better way to seed Web applications into the learning environment and to make them effective educational tools is to implement them in the pre-service teachers programs. This research aimed to investigate the influence of knowledge and experience of Web applications, perceived ease-of use, perceived usefulness, perceived pedagogical support,perceived risk, and colleagues’ influence on the faculty’s decision to adopt Web applications in their teaching within the pre-service teacher programs. Two hundred forty-nine faculty participated in this study by filling an online questionnaire that was self-designed and was distributed to a random proportional stratified sample of the faculty who teach at the colleges of education in American universities. The findings reflect that the faculty currently teaching in these programs are knowledgeable of and have experience in using Web applications and even intend to implement them more in their teaching in the future. The findings showed that faculty knowledge and experience of Web applications and faculty perception of the usefulness of such applications were significant predictors of faculty intention to use Web applications in teaching. This, in turn, is a strong predictor of their actual use. Implementation of the study was provided, along with recommendations for further research.