Subject-Self Affecting on Teachers' Perceived ICT Usability: A Proposition for TAM3+

Introduction

The great philosopher, poet, and the Noble laureate Kabiguru Rabindranath Tagore once wrote “amari chetonar ronge panna holo sobuj, chuni hoye uthlo ranga hoye” (Tagoreweb, n.d.) and this Bengali line implies the significance of ‘ami’ or ‘human self’ in this universe. The existence of this universe is relative of and dependent to this human psychological self. Similarly, William James, a philosopher, a leading thinker of the late 19th century, and the ‘Father of American psychology’ has also observed that there is but one cause of human failure and that is man’s lack of faith in his true self (William James Quotes, n.d.). Self-belief and self-concept holistically named as ‘subjective-self’ by Gergely (2007) that is subjective sense of affective self-experience which is inevitable to succeed in any domain of human life at any developmental stage. Rasman (2018) depicts and points out the strong relationship between self-system and human motivational currents. This self-system is equally effective during technology adoption for information and communication technology (ICT) based teaching-learning. ICT, a ubiquitous aspect of modern human life, plagued with the latest developments relating to ‘reification’ and ‘ephemeralization’ has proved its immense potential in delivering education effectively, especially in the post COVID-19 pandemic affected world when its urgency is being felt more than ever across the globe every hour by every teacher (Kundu & Bej, 2021). In this context, the implication of Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), originally developed by Fred Davis in 1986 is beyond question (Davis, 1989). It shows technology adoption does not merely depend on the available resources and infrastructure rather a large extent of it is dependent on users’ behavioral intention, perceived usefulness, and ease of use or usability. Few more factors have been added in the latest TAM3 version like voluntariness, experience, subjective norms, image, job relevance, output quality, demonstrability, computer efficacy, anxiety, and enjoyment. But the users’ ‘subjective self’ is yet to be explored and has not been given that much importance there. Hence in this study, the authors investigated two important components of teachers’ ICT related subjective self, comprised of self-efficacy and self-concept, to find out their influence on users’ perceived ICT usability.