Student attitude towards application of technology enabled tools in agriculture education: a case study in Sri Lanka institute of advanced technological education during Covid pandemic

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.