Measuring the joint impact of IT adoption and training on academic workload and on research productivity

Abstract

Universities carry a prestigious history with their best aca-demics being awarded Nobel prices for their excellent re-search. However, some universities suffer from high aca-demic workload and from low and skewed research produc-tivity despite the adoption of ICT by their academics. Hav-ing learned from existing literature how ICT adoption and ICT training has influenced productivity in domains such as manufacturing and banking, this paper aims to measure the joint impact of ICT adoption and of ICT training on academ-ic workload and on research productivity in universities. This aim is achieved through an experiment with three IT Masters that also responded to a short questionnaire. The design of the experiment was based on an existing training needs assessment model [1], and the design of the question-naire was based on the Technology Acceptance Model [2]. One student wrote his Masters’ research proposal without the help of the EndNote software. A second student wrote his research proposal with the EndNote software but without training, and the third student worked on his research pro-posal with the EndNote software and with a one week’s EndNote training. Results from this study confirm the joint impact of ICT adoption and of ICT training on research productivity; but such an impact was not proven on academ-ic workload, leaving that second aspect as an area for future research. The analysis of the data collected by the question-naire designed by this study also confirms TAM as a theory to explain how ICT training also affects ICT adoption for the improvement of academic workload and of research productivity.