Abstract:
The purpose of this dissertation was to identify the factors that influence college students’ acceptance of push communication (i.e., email and SMS messaging) as a means of receiving course-related content. This research combined mobile learning models and technology acceptance theories along with push communication literature to determine if a scheduled message impacted students’ reception of the technology.
This study was conducted through two universities and six professors with a total enrollment of 343 students. The surveys were pushed to each student via email and Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging, which resulted in 301 students that opted to participate in the study. A total of four research questions were answered by sixteen hypotheses, of which seven supported the research questions. The most significant of the results was that scheduled messages, the newest construct in the model, did not affect the students’ intention to use push communication as a means to receive course-related content. These findings, based on the survey results, were then compared to actual usage patterns by using Google Analytics embedded in courses’ HTML landing pages.