The role of social awareness in technology acceptance of groupware in virtual learning

IT is everywhere and the need for Groupware support of collaborative learning between geographically distributed students working in teams arises. In this paper we focus on the technology acceptance of Groupware in virtual learning teams in part-time adult education. We apply Davis’ Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) in a qualitative fashion to analyze and interpret the chronological sequence of events leading to the acceptance of the Groupware technology. The data were gathered through an in-depth qualitative Action Research study of four virtual learning teams within two different Masters education programs. By extracting empirical date from one of these virtual teams we show that the TAM model can be used in a qualitative fashion to investigate Groupware technology acceptance. We find that the causal relationship between ease of use and perceived usefulness, postulated by the TAM model, is not present in the case of Groupware technology in a virtual learning team setting. Finally we also find that social awareness plays an important role in the acceptance of such technology to support collaboration.