Alexandru BALOG, Costin PRIBEANU
I C I Bucharest
(National Institute for R & D in Informatics)
8-10 Averescu Blvd.
011455 Bucharest 1, Romania
alexb@ici.ro, pribeanu@ici.ro

Abstract: Motivation is an important factor in modern education and it is claimed that a high level of motivation is a prerequisite for success. Augmented reality (AR) technologies are creating a new kind of user experience (UX) able to increase students’ interest and engagement in the learning process. This study is one of the few attempts to investigate the role of perceived enjoyment in the students’ acceptance of an augmented reality teaching platform (ARTP). Our model captures both extrinsic (perceived usefulness and ease of use) and intrinsic (perceived enjoyment) motivators so that students’s intention to use a new learning environment may be explained.. The model was tested by employing structural equation modelling. The results showed that perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment have a significant impact on the behavioural intention to use ARTP, while perceived ease of use is not a significant direct antecedent. The perceived enjoyment has been proved to be the key influencing factor of intention to use the ARTP.

Keywords: Technology acceptance, perceived enjoyment, augmented reality, structural equation modelling, usability.

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CITE THIS PAPER AS:
Alexandru BALOG, Costin PRIBEANU, The Role of Perceived Enjoyment in the Students’ Acceptance of an Augmented Reality Teaching Platform: a Structural Equation Modelling Approach, Studies in Informatics and Control, ISSN 1220-1766, vol. 19 (3), pp. 319-330, 2010.

1. Introduction

This work reports on a technology acceptance study of an AR-based teaching platform which was developed in the framework of the ARiSE (Augmented Reality for School Environments) research project. The main objective of this project was to test the pedagogical effectiveness of introducing augmented reality teaching platforms in primary and secondary schools. ARTP is featuring a desktop AR technology (Wind et al, 2007) that creates a new kind of user experience by bringing real life objects into a computing environment. In our study, ARTP has both a pragmatic and hedonic character. On the one hand, it should be easy to use and useful for learning. On the other hand, it should provide with an enjoyable learning experience. An important research goal was to investigate the extent to which this learning environment is enhancing the students’ motivation to learn. To address the project’s objectives, we developed a usability questionnaire as a measurement model that goes beyond the traditional usability evaluation approaches, by targeting the educational and motivational value of the ARTP.

User experience is an emerging research topic in the area of HCI so there is neither a consensus on its definition nor a mature methodology for evaluation (Law et al., 2009). Several approaches are taking a holistic view by including both pragmatic and hedonic aspects in order to enrich the existing quality models (Hassenzahl & Tractinsky, 2006). For Cockton (2006), UX evaluation is useful in the context of some intended value. Roto (2006) analysed UX as an integrating umbrella that includes worth-centred design, usability, hedonic aspects and acceptance. These approaches suggest that the evaluation of interactive systems should go beyond pragmatic or hedonic aspects measured in isolation and investigate the user acceptance in order to understand the various factors that influence the intention to use. By incorporating user experience constructs, a technology acceptance model could bring useful insights on the causal relations between UX and other factors that are influencing the behavioural intention to use. Of particular interest for the area of educational systems is the relationship between hedonic and pragmatic aspects which are underlying the motivational and educational value of a given e-learning technology.

A well-known model aiming to explain and predict technology acceptance is TAM (Technology Acceptance Model), developed and validated by Davis (1989), and Davis et al. (1989). The TAM model posits that two beliefs, perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness, determine one’s behavioural intention to use a technology. In a later study, Davis et al. (1992) introduced perceived enjoyment in the model as an intrinsic motivation and defined perceived usefulness as an extrinsic motivation. Perceived enjoyment was defined as “the extent to which the activity of using the computer is perceived to be enjoyable in its own right, apart from any performance consequences that may be anticipated” (Davis et al., 1992). On this basis, perceived enjoyment is a form of intrinsic motivation and emphasizes on the pleasure and inherent satisfaction derivated from the specific activity. They found that the perceived usefulness had a large significant effect on the intention to adopt a technology and its influence was complemented by the perceived enjoyment. Other researchers have also distinguished the effects of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation on the individual’s acceptance of various information technologies (Agarwal & Karahanna, 2000; Heijden, 2004; Shang et al., 2005; Teo et al., 1999; Venkatesh, 1999, 2000). Although there are many studies targeting learning in virtual environments (Krauss et al, 2009; Thorsteinsson et al, 2010) as well as several studies targeting motivational aspects in e-learning (Keller, 2006; Lee et al., 2005) as far as we know, there is no acceptance model reported for AR-based educational systems.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: (a) to evaluate the validity of the measurement model and (b) to explore the causal relationships between the factors influencing the user acceptance of the ARTP. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In the next section we will describe the research model and hypotheses. The methodological framework is briefly presented in section 3. The results of the measurement model evaluation and the structural model testing are presented in section 4. The paper ends with discussion, conclusion and limitations in section 5.

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