Understanding Students’ Acceptance of Online Judge System in Programming Courses: A Structural Equation Modeling Approach

Abstract

An online judge (OJ) system was developed to evaluate programs in online programming contests. They have also been widely applied to help students practice their coding skills; however, no studies have investigated the acceptance of OJ technology by students in online programming courses. In this study, we applied the second generation of the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2) model and partial least-squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to fill this research gap. We recruited 187 undergraduate participants from the Data Science course at Feng Chia University (FCU), Taiwan, in the spring semester of 2021. Our results showed that ‘hedonic motivation’, ‘self-efficacy’, and ‘social influence’ had the most significant positive effects on students’ intention to use the OJ system. Interestingly, academic majors did not play a significant moderating role between the intention to use the OJ system and other influential factors. However, it exerted a significant direct effect on ‘behavioral intention’. Our results can serve as a reference for OJ system developers, designers, instructors, and policymakers within universities.

Keywords

• Online judge system
• programming education
• PLS-SEM
• UTAUT2
• technology acceptance
• learning behavior