Examination of students’ acceptance and intention to use a New LMS during COVID-19 pandemic

The aim of this research is to study the acceptance of university students to use Microsoft Teams e-Learning system and their intention to use it as a Learning Management System (LMS) for education during the COVID-19 pandemic in Jordan. An ex-tended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) with a blend of external factors that are used together for the first time was developed and used for the purpose of this study. TAM was used because of its wide use and success during the past few years for evaluating the influence of different factors affecting the acceptance and intention to use e-Learning platforms within educational institutes. However, all the studies were examining the variables and factors affecting the behavioral intention and acceptance to use LMSs when normal and conventional classroom study is available. In this research, seven external variables, in addition to the four TAM variables, were introduced in a model including one external variable, Internet Connectivity (IC), used for the first time in the field of education. A model is constructed by extending TAM with the introduced external variables, hypotheses are constructed and a questionnaire for 396 students at two universities in Jordan is conducted. Reliability, confirmatory factor, model fit, and hypothesized structural model analyses are presented. Results show that all the variables tested affect, either directly or indirectly, the acceptance and intention to use MS Teams during the pandemic. 21 hypotheses were tested between the constructs and found significant except the relations between (Social Norm - Perceived Usefulness) and (Technical Support - Perceived Usefulness).