EXPLORING UNIVERSITY STUDENTS’ ACCEPTANCE OF E-LEARNING USING E-LEARNING ACCEPTANCE MEASURE (ELAM) IN BHUTAN: A VALIDATION STUDY

Abstract

This study is presented in two sections. A total of 436 students from five different colleges under the Royal University of Bhutan participated in this study. The first part involved validating the E-Learning Acceptance Measure (ELAM) proposed by Teo (2010) for its applicability in the context of the study by using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), which involved 230 students. This was followed by an investigation of Bhutanese HEI students’ acceptance level of the e-learning system, which involved 206 students. In the first section, the findings of the CFA revealed that the ELAM model was a bad fit for the participants and modification indices disclosed that a better fit would be obtained if some items were correlated and removed. After doing this, the findings supported only 17 of 21 items from the ELAM model. As for the second section of the study, the findings showed that the participants held an above-average acceptance level of the e-learning system used in the context. This study concludes with theoretical and practical implications of the findings, together with directions for future research.