Investigating the IT Resources Key Factors in the Iraqi Higher Education Institutions: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Integrating the new technologies to improve the current educational systems makes it compulsory to the higher education institutions to get use of the current IT resources in order to be able to transform the traditional education ways into the e-learning sytems. In Iraq, there are some antecedents facing the higher education institutions regarding the utilization of e-learning systems. In this paper, the researchers proposed a model of a relationship in which a quantitative research design was chosen to verify the proposed factors and construct the relationship among them. The main factors that may affect the IT readiness was declared as three categories: organisation, communication, and technological structure. These three aspects were found to affect the IT capacity and IT capability of the organization that offer the e-learning systems in order to assess the actual use of these systems in the Iraqi higher education institutions. In order to verify that a designed questionnaire, that is reliable and free of errors, two steps of verifications has been followed up. Firstly, a validation phase in which, the questionnaire checked by a panel of experts in the field of e-learning, the comments received was followed up before proceeding to the second phase. Secondly, a pilot study was conducted to check the reliability of the instrument. The collected data has been analysed using the Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient reliability test in SPSS 24 software package. The results showed that all factors are reliable as they gained a value of 0.7 and above in the test.