Abstract:
Higher Education and Education sector were one of the most
impacted sectors with COVID -19 epidemic worldwide. For this
circumstance, widely applied contingency plan was to replace the classroom
education by distance teaching and learning. In such situation, student
readiness and availability of technical infrastructure are paramount elements
to concern; especially in a country like Sri Lanka where the technologically
driven education system has not properly established yet. Therefore, present
study attempted to investigate the student attitude towards technology
enabled education of randomly selected 50 Agriculture students who follow
higher national diploma programme in Sri Lanka Institute of Advanced
Technological Education. A pre-tested survey questionnaire was employed
to assess student attitude towards technology enabled education using
Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) which has three main components of
perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and perceived hedonic
component. The study used Watcharawalee Lertlum and Borworn
Papasratorn construct with minor modifications. Inferential and descriptive
statistics were employed to analyze the data. The sample consisted with
62% (31) of female and 38% (19) of male students and, most of respondents
were in average monthly income category of LKR 20000-40000. Most of
them qualified with prior ICT education. The study focused the availability of
technological infrastructure and found that 84% owned at least one
technological device while the most popular device was ‘Smartphone’. In
contrast, the least popular device was ‘Tablet or Notebook’. Considering the
student attitude, results indicated that 82% of respondents had a high-level
while, 10% and 8% had moderate and low level of attitude respectively.
Further, all three components of TAM model have significant impact on
willingness to apply the technology enabled tools in Agriculture education.
The study implicated that providing some grants such as easy paymentbased purchases, instalment purchases, work and pay basis to obtain own
ICT resources are mandatory with the ICT skill development programs. And
these findings could be utilized into national and institutional policy
development in the arena of enabling ICT facilities into higher education
sector.
