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As higher education institutions in the United States face challenging trends such as declining enrollments and competition among a growing number of online degree programs, there is a renewed focus on strategically investing in technology infrastructure, online program development, and alternative degree plans to attract new student markets and enhance revenue generation. To this end, understanding factors that influence faculty members' acceptance and adoption of technology are key to successful implementation and continued operationalization of these initiatives. Of the body of research involving technology acceptance and adoption in the past few decades, two constructs -- perceived usefulness and perceived ease-of-use -- have proven to be heavily influential of decisions involving technology uptake by users. However, a considerable number of these studies were conducted in voluntary settings -- meaning, users have a choice to use a tool or not. Given that most institutions of higher education do not clearly fall under voluntary or mandatory settings by definition, results of these studies lack ecological validity. Recent research indicates that some users in predominantly mandatory settings view imposed technologies as a stressor that they must cope with. Therefore, coping may be a more appropriate lens to explore technology uptake among faculty members, where even when mandatoriness is not explicit, other factors such as pressure from peers, administrators, or students may compel faculty members to use certain enterprise-wide solutions. Building on the work of coping theory and theories of planned behavior, the current study explores potential influencing factors on faculty members' perceived ratings of their institution's learning management system as a means to determine whether different dimensions of coping, along with external pressure such as subjective norm from students or administrators (representing implicit mandatoriness) influence their perceptions. Seventy-eight faculty members at a large midwestern university completed an online survey designed to capture: (a) individual measures of user experience, (b) subjective norm for students, (c) subjective norm for administration, and (d) four different dimensions of coping, including proactive coping, instrumental support seeking, strategic planning, and avoidance coping. Separate stepwise regressions with no stopping criteria were conducted for perceived usefulness and perceived ease-of-use, respectively. For perceived usefulness, a final model that included subjective norm for students and avoidance coping was generated. For perceived ease-of-use, a final model that included subjective norm for students, strategic planning, and proactive coping was generated. Among subjective measures of the learning management system, the subjective norm for students proved to be the most correlated predictor for both perceived usefulness and perceived ease-of-use. Results indicate that in the absence of top-down mandates, faculty evaluation of enterprise-wide technology solutions can be most closely predicted by whether faculty think students think they should be using the technologies to teach their classes. Given the smaller sample, the removal of Cook's distance influential cases indicates that there may be subsets of faculty underrepresented in the sample that have distinct, different relationships among the variables explored in the models, opening new avenues for additional research. Over the course of this study, the declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic in March 2020 changed the landscape of higher education, thus warranting a new examination of whether instructional technology usage in higher education settings will become more explicitly mandatory in years to come. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

As higher education institutions in the United States face challenging trends such as declining enrollments and competition among a growing number of online degree programs, there is a renewed focus on strategically investing in technology infrastructure, online program development, and alternative degree plans to attract new student markets and enhance revenue generation. To this end, understanding factors that influence faculty members’ acceptance and adoption of technology are key to successful implementation and continued operationalization of these initiatives. Of the body of research involving technology acceptance and adoption in the past few decades, two constructs – perceived usefulness and perceived ease-of-use – have proven to be heavily influential of decisions involving technology uptake by users. However, a considerable number of these studies were conducted in voluntary settings – meaning, users have a choice to use a tool or not. Given that most institutions of higher education do not clearly fall under voluntary or mandatory settings by definition, results of these studies lack ecological validity. Recent research indicates that some users in predominantly mandatory settings view imposed technologies as a stressor that they must cope with. Therefore, coping may be a more appropriate lens to explore technology uptake among faculty members, where even when mandatoriness is not explicit, other factors such as pressure from peers, administrators, or students may compel faculty members to use certain enterprise-wide solutions.Building on the work of coping theory and theories of planned behavior, the current study explores potential influencing factors on faculty members’ perceived ratings of their institution’s learning management system as a means to determine whether different dimensions of coping, along with external pressure such as subjective norm from students or administrators (representing implicit mandatoriness) influence their perceptions. Seventy-eight faculty members at a large midwestern university completed an online survey designed to capture: (a) individual measures of user experience, (b) subjective norm for students, (c) subjective norm for administration, and (d) four different dimensions of coping, including proactive coping, instrumental support seeking, strategic planning, and avoidance coping. Separate stepwise regressions with no stopping criteria were conducted for perceived usefulness and perceived ease-of-use, respectively. For perceived usefulness, a final model that included subjective norm for students and avoidance coping was generated. For perceived ease-of-use, a final model that included subjective norm for students, strategic planning, and proactive coping was generated. Among subjective measures of the learning management system, the subjective norm for students proved to be the most correlated predictor for both perceived usefulness and perceived ease-of-use. Results indicate that in the absence of top-down mandates, faculty evaluation of enterprise-wide technology solutions can be most closely predicted by whether faculty think students think they should be using the technologies to teach their classes. Given the smaller sample, the removal of Cook’s distance influential cases indicates that there may be subsets of faculty underrepresented in the sample that have distinct, different relationships among the variables explored in the models, opening new avenues for additional research. Over the course of this study, the declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic in March 2020 changed the landscape of higher education, thus warranting a new examination of whether instructional technology usage in higher education settings will become more explicitly mandatory in years to come.