Personality traits and the intention to continue to use the Smart Learning Technologies: The role played by internal and external motivations in the relationship between the Big Five Personality Traits and the Intention to Continue to Use MOOCs (ICM)

Smart Learning Technologies (SLT) transformed the relationship between the teacher and the student to be more student-centric teaching. However, the dropout rate of using SLT is prevailing. This research develops and tests a new psychological model to understand the role of the personality in continuing using the SLT. This study aims to examine the role of personality traits (i.e., agreeableness, extraversion, and conscientiousness) to understand the variances in the levels of intention to continue using the MOOCs (ICM) by taking into consideration external and internal motivations (i.e., those enforced by external sources and those stemming from self-motivation). After analysis on a sample of 136 students in Spanish universities using PLS path analysis, the internal motivation plays a significant full mediating role in understanding the relationship between the personality and intention to continue use for all except for the extraversion. Extraversion is externally motivated but no evidence to support the mediating impact nor the effect on the intention to continue use. None of the personality traits found to have a significant direct impact on ICM. Internal motivation, not external motivation, is found to influence the ICM significantly. This model explains 49% of the variation in ICM. The main implication of this research is that different personalities need different motivations for their use of SLT in order to keep using them in the future. Practical implications are developed to encourage student learning using SLT.