Authors:
Luis Borges Gouveia
1
and
Steven Abrantes
2
Affiliations:
1
Universidade Fernando Pessoa, Portugal
;
2
Polytechnic Institute of Viseu, Portugal
Keyword(s):
Higher education, Computer messaging, Online discussion forum, Innovation adoption.
Abstract:
This paper aims is to validate which of the students, involved in this study, are in the initial and the majority market of adopters and also classify what type of messages do these different kind of students send when using an online discussion forum. One hundred and twelve students in a higher education context were involved in this research. This study is based on the categories proposed by Roger (2003) for the adoption of innovations theory, and by Mesquita (2007) proposal for the classification of messages. In terms of adoption of innovation we concluded that the first 16%, i.e., the initial market contains 14 respondents and the next 84%, which are those that belong to the market majority, consisted on 67 respondents. Regarding the number of messages sent by each kind of students in terms of innovation, we concluded that the students that belong to the initial market, sent more messages, in terms of the average messages sent, than the students that belong to the majority market.