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Top1. Introduction
Since the fourth quarter of year 2019, the world is still suffering from the spread of Covid-19 and its unexpected variants, which recognized as pandemic in the beginning of 2020. No one denies the negative impact of this pandemic on our lives. Its effect influences different sectors over the world; industry, transportation, aviation, service providing, businesses, in addition to the education, are examples of the most effective sectors (Momani et al., 2022). Besides this effect, the huge number of confirmed cases and high mortality rates in some affected countries have made a feeling of fear among people against social gathering. As precaution procedure, governments over the world moved toward lockdown and curfew. They issued different policies to control the social activities. Policies such as social isolation, social distancing, and institutional and self-quarantine were introduced (Momani, 2022). Therefore, social isolation becomes one of most successfully used methods during this crisis to limiting mixing and direct contact between people. Masoom (2016) defined social isolation as “the loss of social relations at the personal level, or disengagement from essential social institutions from societal level.”
While millions, even billions, of people enforced to stay at their homes to get rid of infection and activating the social isolation, alternative mediums of communication have become needed. In education, distance learning or electronic learning (e-learning) was the suit alternative to continuing the learning process, especially for higher education level. The existence of Learning Management Systems (LMSs), e.g., Moodle, WebCT, and Blackboard, video conferencing applications, e.g., MS-Teams, Zoom, and WebEx, helps in compensating the shortage in physical contact between students and instructors (Momani, 2021b). LMSs have been defined by Turnbull et al. (2019) as “web-based software platforms that provide an interactive online learning environment and automate the administration, organization, delivery, and reporting of educational content and learner outcomes”. Therefore, LMSs are enabling teachers sharing materials, creating assessments, and communicating with their students in a professional virtual way without hindrance of time and place. Many universities and higher-education institutions over the world activated their contingency plans and moved to distance learning. Obviously, the noble role of technology is compensating, filling the gap, and recovering the negative effect of this crisis.
This study has been conducted to reveal the students’ perspective regarding the adoption of LMSs after the pandemic and continue using them after recovery. Thus, the arisen problem is that this sudden conversion to the distance learning needs to be examined in order to evaluate and explore the students’ acceptance and dependence on LMSs. This study suggests applying one of the technology acceptance theories as a proposed approach to assess the ability of the proposed research population (Jordanian students) to adopt such kind of technology (LMSs) within their usage behavior (online learning). According to Momani and Jamous (2017), this approach is considered as a technique or testing in software engineering which has a strong interconnection with the psychological and sociological sciences. So, this study proposed a modification on the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT), where it is recognized as one of the most intensive and robust technology acceptance theories (Al-adaileh et al., 2022; Momani, 2020).
After almost two years of moving to distance learning, this experience needs to be evaluated. Technology acceptance tests are designed for such kind of studies. Actually, technology acceptance tests were recognized by researchers as a mature step of information systems development. As mentioned by Teo (2011), “technology acceptance is the willingness of an individual to adopt the use of technology for facilitating task performance based on the support it was designed to provide”. Scholars concluded that the acceptance of LMSs among learners varies from country to another (Almuraqab, 2020; Santiago et al., 2020). Accordingly, this study investigates the most significant factors effecting the adoption and led to the acceptance of LMSs through the higher-education process across 423 undergraduate and postgraduate students from several universities in Jordan.