Examining university students’ attitudes towards using web-conferencing systems in distance learning courses: A study on scale development and application

Abstract

The study aimed to develop a scale to assess students’ attitudes towards using interactive web conferencing systems in distance learning courses. An item pool was formed based on a review of the literature and the participants’ written views. A draft scale was developed with 29 items selected from this item pool. It was applied to 1100 undergraduate students in a distance program in theology, who took courses using Adobe Connect as a video conference system, together with Moodle as a learning management system. After removing incomplete or improperly filled questionnaires, a total of 596 participants’ responses were used for factor analysis. The scale was made up of four factors: user expectations on web-conference systems, user preferences for web-conferencing system, user attitudes towards using web-conferencing systems, and user problems experienced while using web-conferencing systems.