Examination of relationships among students' self-determination, technology acceptance, satisfaction, and continuance intention to use K-MOOCs

Recognizing the recent MOOC movement in higher education, this study aims to examine credit-receiving university students' motivation to use K-MOOCs. In the hypothesized model, we posit three student-level variables, namely self-determination, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use, and satisfaction as a mediating variable, and examine how these variables affect students' continuance intention to use K-MOOCs. This study hypothesizes: 1) perceived ease of use has a positive influence on perceived usefulness; 2) self-determination, perceived ease of use, and perceived usefulness has a positive influence on satisfaction; and 3) satisfaction has a positive influence on continuance intention to use K-MOOCs. The participants include 222 university students who took the K-MOOC course offered by a large-sized university in Korea. For data collection and analysis, we adapted the existing instruments to fit into our research goals and conducted structural equation modeling to investigate the relationships among the latent variables. The results indicate that both perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness had a positive influence on students' satisfaction with the K-MOOC course. Satisfaction with the K-MOOC course significantly had a positive influence on students' continuance intention to use. The perceived ease of use and the perceived usefulness, mediated by satisfaction, had indirect effects on the continuance intention to use K-MOOCs. Unexpectedly, students' self-determination did not have a significant influence on satisfaction with the K-MOOC course. The contribution of this study is that it provides empirical evidence regarding what factors are likely to influence credit-receiving students' continuance intention to use K-MOOCs and the motivational factors underlying students' intention to earn credits rather than intrinsic motivation.