A technological acceptance of remote laboratory in chemistry education

Research Design

The convergent parallel design mixed method was used in this study. Concurrent timing was applied to implement the quantitative and qualitative strands during the same phase of the research procedure, which was done by prioritising the methods equally and keeping the strands independent during analysis and then mixing the results during the overall interpretation (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2017). The quantitative approach consisted of 81 respondents who completed the survey questionnaire, followed by the qualitative approach with seven respondents who took part in the interview. It was the specific aim to attempt to evaluate the technological acceptance of Chemistry students, and the opinions of Chemistry students, lecturers as well as laboratory assistants towards the use of remote laboratory in Chemistry education.

Respondents

Since Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris (UPSI) does not implement remote laboratory in Chemistry education, we were interested to study the technological acceptance of remote laboratory among the students. The population for this study involved the students majoring in Chemistry at UPSI. There were 109 students in Semesters 1, 3, 6 and 8. According to Krejcie and Morgan (1970), the sample size of this research was supposed to be 86 respondents. The criterion of choosing the sample was based on the Chemistry students with at least one semester of experience in conducting laboratory session at UPSI. Thus, only 74.31% of the population were chosen as the respondents in this study, excluding researcher and Semester 1 students. Semester 1 students were not chosen because they were new to the Chemistry courses and lack of laboratory experiences at UPSI. In summary, 28 students from Semester 8, 37 students from Semester 6, and 16 students from Semester 3 were chosen as respondents for the survey questionnaire in this study.

On the other hand, five lecturers from different fields of Chemistry (Physical, Analytical, Inorganic, Organic and Polymer) were chosen for the interview session. Each lecturer was chosen based on having at least five years of experience in conducting laboratory sessions in their field. Two laboratory assistants who are experienced in their respective fields were also chosen for the interview to evaluate their opinions towards the use of remote laboratory in Chemistry education.

Instruments

The instruments involved in this study were the questionnaire and the interview protocol. The questionnaire survey had been distributed to the Chemistry students, whereas the interview to the Chemistry lecturers and laboratory assistants had been conducted by the researcher.

Questionnaire
Technology acceptance is a user’s willingness to employ technology designed to support tasks (Teo, 2011). In this study, it refers to the Chemistry students’ willingness to use remote laboratory in carrying out experiments. A set of questionnaires was used to collect data from the Chemistry students to evaluate the technological acceptance of remote laboratory in Chemistry education. The questionnaire consisted of three sections which included respondents’ demographic, opinion on advantages and disadvantages of conducting experiments by using remote laboratory, and survey items on students’ technological acceptance on remote laboratory.

Section A consisted of several items on the demographic information. In section B, an open-ended question was asked in which the respondents needed to give their opinion on the advantages and disadvantages of conducting experiments by using remote laboratory. Section C consisted of four main constructs; perceived of usefulness (PU), perceived ease of use (PEOU), attitude toward use (ATU), and behavioural intention (BI). These four main constructs were based on Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) (Davis, 1989). TAM was originally developed by Davis (1989) to explain the acceptance of using new technologies (Aypay, Çelik, Aypay & Sever, 2012; Wong, Rosma, Goh & Mohd Khairezan, 2013). Remote laboratory is considered as a new technology among Chemistry students at UPSI. Thus, in this study, TAM was used to evaluate the students’ technological acceptance of remote laboratory. Since the original items were asked in terms of general technology, the survey items were adapted from previous studies (Davis, 1989; Teo, Wong & Chai, 2008; Willis, 2008; Wong et al., 2013) and some modifications had been done to meet the requirement of the current study. The descriptions for the constructs in the survey items are stated in Table I.

Table I. The Descriptions of Constructs in Survey Items

Construct	Explanation
Perceived of Usefulness (PU) (adapted from Davis 1989; Teo, Wong & Chai, 2008)	The degree to which a student believes that using remote laboratory will enhance his or her performance.
Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU) (adapted from Davis 1989; Wong et al., 2013)	The extent to which a student believes that using remote laboratory would be free of effort.
Attitude toward Use (ATU) (adapted from Davis 1989; Wong et al., 2013)	Students’ attitude toward the use of remote laboratory.
Behavioural Intention (BI) (adapted from Davis 1989; Willis, 2008; Wong et al., 2013)	Students’ intention to engage in the behaviour to use the remote laboratory.

All of the constructs in section C used a four-point Likert scale ranging from ‘Strongly Disagree’ to ‘Strongly Agree’ which is similar to Wong and his colleagues (2013). This section consisted of 12 items and all the items were positive statements. The distribution of items on students’ technological acceptance of remote laboratory is shown in Table II. Before carrying out the actual study, a pilot test was carried out to a group of students who were not the respondents in the actual study. The reliability coefficient obtained was 0.90.

Table II. Distribution of Items for Students’ Technological Acceptance of Remote Laboratory

Construct	Item Number in the Questionnaire	Total Items
Perceived of Usefulness (PU)	1,2,3	3
Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU)	4,5,6	3
Attitude toward Use (ATU)	7,8,9	3
Behavioural Intention (BI)	10,11,12	3
Total Items		12

Interview Protocol
The second instrument used in this study was the interview protocol. The information collected from the interview session was to evaluate the opinions of Chemistry lecturers and laboratory assistants towards the use of remote laboratory in Chemistry education. Questions asked during the interview session are listed in Table III.

Table III. Semi-Structured Interview Questions

No	Questions
1.	Have you ever heard about remote laboratory?
2.	Will you accept the future implementation of remote laboratory in Chemistry education?
3.	What are the advantages of the remote laboratory that you can imagine?
4.	What are the disadvantages of the remote laboratory that you can imagine?
5.	Do you have any suggestion on the topic of Chemistry experiments that is possible to apply the remote laboratory in the future?

Procedure

This study was aimed to study the technological acceptance of remote laboratory in Chemistry education among Chemistry students, lecturers and laboratory assistants. Data collection mainly depended on questionnaire and interview questions. Pilot study was carried out in order to determine the validity and reliability of the instruments. In this study, the validity of the instruments was assessed by three experts in the educational field and calculated by using Content Validity Index (CVI). CVI is the degree to which an instrument has an appropriate sample of items for construct being measured (Polit & Beck, 2006). In this study, the I-CVI/Ave (Item-Content Validity Index/Average) for questionnaire and interview protocol were 0.83 and 0.80 respectively. This showed the content validity for both instruments was satisfied (Polit & Beck, 2006). The reliability coefficient was calculated by using Cronbach’s alpha in Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS) version 20. In this study, the reliability coefficient obtained was satisfied at 0.90 (Chua, 2013). This result indicated that the questionnaire is suitable for conducting such study and the actual study can be proceeded.

Both instruments (questionnaire and interview questions) were modified based on the comments and suggestions given by the experts in the validity forms before conducting the pilot study. Apart from that, the transcriptions for the interview were verified by each of the interviewees to ensure the validity of interview data.

The questionnaire was distributed to the student respondents in the lecture rooms and a short briefing regarding the purpose of the study was given. Two videos regarding remote laboratory were shown to the student respondents in order to enhance their understanding on remote laboratory before answering the questionnaire. A total of fifteen minutes was given to the students to answer the questionnaire items. After that, the questionnaire was immediately collected and then analysed by using percentage (%), frequency (f), mean and standard deviation (SD).

For the interview protocol, five Chemistry lecturers and two laboratory assistants were selected to evaluate their opinions on using remote laboratory in Chemistry education. The interview sessions was carried out by using Malay language, English language or both languages based on the requirements and the convenience of the respondents. Each of the interview session was audio recorded and transcribed. The lecturers and laboratory assistants’ answers during the interview session and the students’ responses in the questionnaire were analysed using the keywords to interpret the meaning. Then the keywords were coded and then grouped under the same category in terms of advantages and disadvantages of remote laboratory. The categories of advantages and disadvantages of remote laboratory were formed based on literature reviews in the same context. After that, the transcriptions were verified by the respondents to obtain the validity of the transcriptions. Finally, the responses in the interviews were analysed to answer the research questions.