How Covid-19 is changing attitudes towards digital learning
Combining private passion and work brings joy to everyone! Today, at this year’s AMCIS 2021, Christian Maier and Professor Laumer published the joint paper “How Soccer Referees Changed their Mind: A Belief-Update Perspective on Digital Learning during the Covid-19 Pandemic”.
In our research, we were interested in how the mandatory induced use of technology through Covid-19 might have changed the views of soccer referees on digital learning. For this, 524 referees were surveyed and the belief-update theory was used to propose and validate a model that illustrates how Covid-19 triggered a positive belief-update for beliefs about ICT-based training in a community sports context.
The findings suggest that, even though the referees were not too willing to use technology voluntarily before Covid-19, the acceptance grew after being forced to use ICT for online training during the pandemic. This shows, that experiences made in an externally forced mandatory setting can trigger positive beliefs about ICT. So, a crisis can definitely serve as a driver for ICT-based innovation in a community sports context.
Thanks to Christian Maier for the teamwork and to all participants of today’s session for their valuable input!