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At the inception of Internet in 1968, the US Department of Defense used only one computer to link its four sites. Available figures show that usage of Internet has increased dramatically around the globe from West to East. According to Internet World Stats (2004) approximate users of Internet in 1990 were 3 million which increased to 50 million in 1998. Figure in 2004 showed, the total number of users at more than 800 million. While this figure confirms the dramatic increase of users (Garland et al., 1998), research by Dineva and Koufteros (2002) provided a parameter of economic and social benefits of Internet usage by identifying the contribution made by Internet in increasing job productivity, information access, technology updates and social networks. Their findings demonstrated that Internet contributes immensely for both economic and social development. Despite these benefits received from Internet, there are huge social problems created arising from its usage (Hashim et al., 2010). Subsequently, cautious steps are needed to ensure more benefits are received through the use of the internet by reducing its negative impact.
Since Internet works as micro but important branch of technology, the technology acceptance Model (TAM) invented by Davis (1989) was used to measure the acceptance of Internet usage. TAM was working with some criticism as regard the context of Internet needs some particular focus. Comprehending this reality, scholars have beenworking for the development and validation process on acceptance of Internet since early 1990s (Taylor & Todd, 1995; Venkatesh & Morris, 2000; Yousafzai et al., 2007; Shamdasani et al., 2008; Legris et al., 2003; Ahmad et al., 2010; Islam, 2011).
Research Context
In line with this technological development, International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) has also provided the infrastructure of wireless internet to its community, thereby helping the learners in getting access to their subject related materials and keeping up with the current information updates. Though widely adopted, there are many aspects of the usage and implementation of this technology that need to be studied and empirically documented. While Wireless Internet access has been provided for quite some time now at IIUM, there are still many barriers that limit the successful integration and usage of this emerging educational technology within its environment. Determinants such as perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and computer self-efficacy and satisfaction were postulated to be some of the major barriers.
Survey conducted by Oliver and Towers (2000) with the students studying in Australian universities perceived that about 80% of academics used technology in regular ways as part of the teaching and learning program. Malaysia is a developing country which is progressing towards development, keeping right and steady pace following the models implemented and practiced in developed countries. Malaysia extracts ideology for the development process especially for education sector from such developed countries like Australia.
In Malaysia, the implementation of technology in teaching and learning activity has attracted great interest from the practitioners in higher education institutions (HEIs), which have started to adopt and implement information and communication technology (ICT) solutions as a source for flexible teaching and learning process (Azizan, 2010). This helps students surf the internet and get its access through their laptops, desktop computers, mobile phone and personal digital assistant (PDA).
Despite the benefits that such increased technological options can provide, there are still many barriers to the successful integration and usage of emerging educational technology such as Wireless Internet within educational environments (Roblyer, 2006; Wozney et al., 2006). As such, the broad objective of the study is to develop and validate the technology satisfaction model (TSM) to evaluate students’ satisfaction in using wireless internet for learning environment. For this purpose, TAM was used as the theoretical framework; this model and the various constructs used in the study were described in the next section.