Ready for on-line education.com? Exploring technology use disposition of potential users

Summary form only given. Online distance education services can be considered as an important part of the electronic commerce revolution with an emerging off-line environment (learning materials on CD-ROM with Internet connection/educational sites with CD-ROM extensions for memory-intensive multimedia demonstrations). To help educational planners understand the technology use disposition of potential Long Distance Graduate Programs users, a research project was conducted and key findings are presented here. With that knowledge as a base, educators should examine appropriate ways for their institutions to exploit IT and wield it as a strategic asset, and develop programs to deal successfully with the online educational services characteristics of low compatibility and high complexity. Even though the technology disposition use is an important differentiation component for a new distance education service, such as online programs, so far the exploration of the phenomena was not been made, for this reason this paper provides a unique contribution to the long distance educational field. The present study is based on survey data collected using the instrument proposed by Parasuraman to determine the technology use disposition index. For this data a factor analysis with orthogonal rotation (VARIMAX) was run, extracting factors considering the Kaiser criteria of eigenvalues (latent roots) equal or above 1.00 and using the principal components technique. For results verification the maximum likelihood technique was used