Factors Influencing Engineering Faculty’s Use Of Tablet Pcs

This paper reports on a study of Tablet PC (TPC) usage by twenty engineering faculty members at a large land-grant university in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. The purpose of this study is to explore how engineering faculty choose to use TPCs, the faculty’s perceptions of TPC use, and the factors related to the faculty’s use of TPCs in engineering classrooms. The faculty are volunteers, representing eleven different engineering disciplines. The authors applied both qualitative and quantitative methods to identify the factors that influence TPC use. The research findings reveal that the percent of class time in which the TPC is used is significantly correlated with the faculty’s perceived ease of use (r=.429, p<.05), perceived usefulness (r=.454, p<.05), and self-efficacy in TPC use (r=.520, p<.05). Individual interviews with the faculty support the relationships found in the correlational analysis. Possible explanations for these findings are presented and discussed.