Date of Conferral

2016

Degree

Doctor of Education (Ed.D.)

School

Education

Advisor

Thomas Hadley

Abstract

Web 2.0 technologies offer many educational benefits in higher education. Leaders of the U.S. community college examined in this study desired to explore students' familiarity with the educational benefits of Web 2.0 tools before investing in technology upgrades for the college. The purpose of this quantitative survey research was to explore community college student readiness to use Web 2.0 technologies as part of their distance learning experience. The research questions were designed to clarify students' attitudes and behavioral intentions towards using Web 2.0 applications. Data were collected from 253 randomly selected distance-learning students using a survey derived from the decomposed theory of planned behavior (DTPB). The DTPB assesses individuals' likely actions related to using Web 2.0 technologies as a function of behavioral intentions reflected through attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control. Results of the Spearman rho analyses indicated significant positive relationships related to Web 2.0 applications between attitude and behavioral intentions, subjective norms and behavior, peer influence and subjective norms, and self-efficacy with facilitating conditions and perceived behavioral control. There was no relationship between perceived behavioral control and behavior. Additional findings revealed that students perceived the existence of a beneficial social network within the distance-learning environment. The results of this study facilitated college administrator awareness of students' perceptions of using Web 2.0 tools for learning, and suggest that implementing these tools would be beneficial for the students and college by creating a more inclusive learning environment for online students.

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