Barriers to adopting technology for teaching and learning in Oman

22 n the right circumstances, new technologies adopted by members of a community will spread by diffusion. One of the most robust findings about innovation diffusion is that shifts from one technology or product to another follow a sigmoid, or cumulative normal, distribution.1–3 Thus, the rate of adoption usually starts low, accelerates until about 50 percent of the community has adopted the technology, then decelerates, eventually approaching zero, as nearly everyone in the community has adopted the technology. Adoption or diffusion also can be characterized as a normal distribution, or bell curve. Using the normal distribution model, Rogers identified five major categories of individual adopters (see Figure 1).4 Many factors affect the rate of adoption, including an innovation’s characteristics and various economic, sociological, organizational, and psychological variables. Understanding the rate of adoption in any given situation requires analyzing factors that may facilitate the adoption and those that may operate as barriers to adoption. One recent study conducted at Illinois State University identified several factors that affected adoption of instructional technology by faculty, especially Internet and Web technologies.5 The Barriers to Adopting Technology