Exploring Electronic Communication Modes Between Iraqi Faculty and Students of Pharmacy Schools Using the Technology Acceptance Model

INTRODUCTION

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) include any communication device or application, such as smartphones, tablets, computers, videos, distance learning, network hardware and software, and others.¹ Electronic communications save time and effort. Iraqi universities are still developing electronic communications, particularly in circumstances related to instructor-student electronic communications. For instance, most Iraqi universities have not adopted university official email or other web-based communication systems. Iraqi universities have neither implemented Electronic Course Management Systems nor fully activated university email. At most Iraqi universities, only faculty members have university email accounts. However, most faculty members do not have their students’ academic email addresses because students are not provided with academic email accounts. Even among faculty members, using one’s university email account remains unpopular. In contrast, Facebook, which started in 2004, is very popular and rapidly spreading as a social network site in Iraq. Hence, some faculty members have been using their personal Facebook account for academic purposes, such as informing their students about important upcoming school events. Moreover, many students use Facebook to ask their professors academic-related questions. According to the Arab Social Media Report (2015), 88% of social media users in Iraq have a Facebook account and 99% of Facebook subscribers have daily access to their accounts.²

Literature Review

Facebook can improve the learning experience of students through communication with teachers and classmates in addition to sharing academic materials.³ Roblyer and colleagues concluded that college students are more willing to use Facebook for academic purposes than faculty members.⁴ Hall and colleagues found that 91.8% of pharmacy students in the UK used social media.⁵ Given the increased use of technology for teaching purposes, many studies have looked at the impact of different forms of technologies on academic progress. Kim and colleagues reported on other studies that concluded that adapting technology improves teaching and learning processes. Technology like computer-based testing was suggested because it was easy to use and economical.⁶ One Iranian study demonstrated that almost all faculty members believed that ICTs are much better than traditional means of education.¹ An Australian study found that integrating ICTs into academic programs provides many benefits for both college students and faculty. For instance, ICTs provide fast and convenient access to information, improve communication, enhance student in-class participation, facilitate distance education, and help students review class materials.⁷ A study covering six schools and colleges of pharmacy across the US showed that the vast majority of faculty members (86%) and students (91%) agreed that adoption of technology such as course management systems and lecture capture satisfied their needs.⁸ Mazer and colleagues explored faculty self-disclosure (using narratives and humor) via Facebook on college student motivation.⁹ They found that students who had access to high self-disclosed faculty Facebook profiles had a high level of motivation, active learning and positive classroom learning.⁹

Theoretical Framework

In 1989, Davis and colleagues introduced the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), which posits factors predicting the acceptability of information technologies. The TAM has been used to explore the factors influencing health care provider acceptance to use new technologies.¹⁰ The independent factors include Perceived Usefulness (PU), Perceived Ease of Use (PEU), Attitude Toward Using (ATU) and Behavioral Intention to Use (BIU). In our study, the technologies were Facebook and university email. The outcome variables included the use of these technologies for academic purposes. Perceived usefulness (PU) means faculty members believe that adopting information technology improves their teaching and students perceive that using Facebook for academic purposes enhances their learning. Perceived ease of use (PEU) refers to faculty belief that adopting a new technology will not require much effort. The TAM proposes that intention to use directly influences the actual use of information technology. Perceived usefulness of technology directly affects attitude toward using and intention to use. Perceived ease of technology use directly influences perceived usefulness and attitude toward using (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Modified Technology Acceptance Model.^11,17 Reprinted with permission from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.

Teo in 2011 had modified TAM by adding another construct, which is facilitating conditions (FC), to measure factors influencing teachers’ intention to use technologies.¹¹ Facilitating conditions is the extent to which an individual believes that technical support and facilities are available in the setting to facilitate adoption of a new technology (Figure 1). Teo proved that the FC has a significant direct effect on the outcome (Actual Technology Use-ACU) and an indirect effect through influencing BIU and PEU.¹¹ Teo demonstrated that variability in technology use was much better explained by the TAM when FC was added as a predictor, such that TAM explained 61% of the variance in actual technology use.¹¹ Individual characteristics may also influence technology use, so we also evaluated these as predictors (Figure 1).

We conducted this study in six Iraqi public universities, which are fully government funded and provide free education. All Iraqi colleges of pharmacy offer five-year bachelor programs according to the regulations of the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education.

Investigators have studied perceptions about adoption of communication and information technologies at American universities for more than a decade. However, to our knowledge no prior research has evaluated university-level instructor-student electronic communication using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). Our study is unique in using TAM to explore factors influencing ICTs acceptance by students and faculty members at schools and colleges of pharmacy in Iraq. This study aimed to explore for the first time the extent to which Iraqi pharmacy students and faculty members use Facebook and university email for daily academic communication. A second aim was to examine the factors influencing the utilization of Facebook and university email for academic purposes on national level using TAM.

DISCUSSION

Electronic faculty-student communication modes facilitate academic discussion and save time outside the classroom. There is no official university electronic communication mode between Iraqi colleges of pharmacy faculty and students. We investigated the use of available social media, Facebook, as an alternative given the absence of adequate university email infrastructure. A study involving four schools and colleges of pharmacy in Ohio, revealed that the majority (89%) of faculty declined friendship requests from current students on Facebook, and only a few (12%) accepted friendship requests from students or used Facebook for academic purposes.¹⁴ In contrast, more than half (57%) of Iraqi Pharmacy faculty accepted their current student friendship requests on Facebook. Because an official university email is available in the US to connect students and faculty, they believe there is no need to employ social media for academic communications. Iraqi faculty may feel Facebook can fill the gap of not having a university email.

Approximately two-thirds of the student-respondents were female. The majority (64.8%) of students at Iraqi schools and colleges of pharmacy are females because they generally score higher than males in their high school’s standardized exam (Baccalaureate). Thus, girls have a better chance of being accepted by highly ranked medical, pharmacy, and dentistry colleges. Because the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education does not require a pre-pharmacy degree to apply for pharmacy colleges, only a small portion (8.5%) of pharmacy-student respondents had a two-year pre-pharmacy degree (Table 1). Full-time pharmacy students usually have a full academic schedule from 8:30 am to 3:30 pm five days a week, resulting to only a small percent (22.9%) of students working in community pharmacies. Iraqi colleges of pharmacy offer five-year bachelor programs for students with a high school diploma. The age range of college students is typically 19 to 23 years. Thus, most (90.1%) student-participant were 21- to 23-years old. The University of Kufa had the second (after Baghdad) highest number of enrolled pharmacy students in 2014/2015 academic year and it contributed to more than half of student-respondents (Table 1).

Schools and colleges of pharmacy in Iraq are usually independent colleges wherein students take almost all their courses within the same college. This characteristic explains the availability of faculty members from more than five different disciplines other than pharmacy, though pharmacy was the most common background of faculty participants (Table 2). The percent of faculty-respondents with more than 10 years in practice was around one-third because most experienced professors either retire at age 65, immigrated and left Iraq after 2003 or did not respond. The same reasons apply to a minority (22%) of faculty-respondents with high academic titles (full professor, associate professor and assistant professor) (Table 2). Most (73.4%) faculty-respondents had been teaching undergraduate students because they do not have the required doctoral degree and academic titles (professor, associate or assistant professor) that allow them to teach graduate students.

According to the findings of both faculty and student surveys, more than three-quarters of students and two-thirds of faculty perceived Facebook as easy to use. In contrast, less than half of each group perceived university email as easy to use (Table 3). Ease of use may incentivize faculty to use Facebook for academic purposes over email. For example, faculty members can use Facebook to distribute a class announcement just by posting on their profile; while to use email, faculty members need to collect and save all student email addresses that are not available in university email. Additionally, students may browse Facebook more frequently than check their emails.

Table 4A shows significant differences in the use of Facebook for academic purposes between university of Kufa and the universities of Duhok and Basrah while the differences with the other three universities are not significant. This may be due to the difference in the city cultures. Those three universities are located in three different provinces across Iraq. Duhok province is located in the northern region of Iraq (Kurdistan) and people who live there speak the Kurdish language. Al-Kufa University is located in the middle province (Al-Najaf) and Basrah in the south, and people in both provinces speak Arabic. Al-Najaf city is a more conservative city (holy city) and female students might tend to ask questions electronically rather than face to face. Additionally, almost all the students of Al-Kufa college of pharmacy have a Facebook account, send friendship invitations to their instructors and ask course-related questions via Facebook more frequently than the students at both Basrah and Duhok colleges. In our study, 38% of faculty members have answered student questions via Facebook. On the other hand, the Ohio study found a small number of faculty using Facebook for academic online discussions.¹⁴

Students who are Facebook friends with their current instructors is socially accepted behavior in the Iraqi culture. Nevertheless, using Facebook for academic communications may harm professional reputations, risk privacy of the faculty-student conversations and negatively influence faculty credibility.^9,15 Additionally, it blends the personal life (with family and friends) and academic life (with instructors and students) and this may negatively impact the faculty-student academic relationship. Using a closed Facebook group for each course may be an alternative to maintain privacy. A closed group does not require students to be friends with their current instructors.

The unstable security conditions within Iraq may have negatively influenced technical maintenance for university electronic communications such as email. In addition to unrest, the cost of adapting advance technologies may be a second barrier, particularly in public universities that are government-funded and apply no fees. In our study, low percentages of faculty members and students had used university email for academic purposes (Table 3). University of Kufa College of Pharmacy was the only college providing university email to its students. Availability of technologies may depend on university resources. In contrast, Stolte and colleagues found 90% of pharmacy students in the US are comfortable with using technologies for academic purposes, including university email.¹⁶

The correlation analyses showed significant positive correlation between faculty and student use of university email and use of Facebook for academic communications. The large portion of young faculty may contribute to the use of electronic communications (Facebook and email). The TAM theoretical framework guided the study and survey questionnaires. After testing TAM to investigate which factors influence using Facebook for academic purposes, only three (intention to use, attitude and perceived usefulness) out of the six TAM concepts had significant association with the outcome variable across the two populations and the two communication technologies. The facilitating conditions variable that Teo found to be important was not significant in all four logistic regression analyses.¹¹ We added personal characteristic variables to modified TAM and only two of these characteristics (university and gender) had significant associations with using Facebook for academic purposes. Universities are located in culturally different cities and may vary in use of Facebook for academic purposes. Female faculty members were less likely to use Facebook for academic purposes than male faculty. For cultural reasons, Iraqi women are generally less active on Facebook than men, and this may extend to academic use.

For faculty members, the sample size was not large enough to give significant results for a larger number of variables in the regression analyses. The sample was one of convenience and that may weaken the generalization of the findings. However, the study included six colleges from six different provinces from four different geographical areas across Iraq. Eighty-two percent of the student-respondents and 87% of the faculty-respondents submitted complete surveys. Responding to electronic surveys is fairly new for Iraqis. This unfamiliarity or survey fatigue may have influenced response rates (18% and 13%). Using an electronic survey had some accessibility limitations, particularly for students because most of them were not using university email. In addition, use of an electronic survey could have biased the results toward responses of those more comfortable with technology. Nevertheless, we offered paper surveys for those who agreed to participate and who may not have neither email nor Facebook account accounts.