ACCEPTANCE AND USE OF DIGITAL EDUCATION PLATFORM: AN APPLICATION OF UTAUT2

Digital education platforms, which act as a critical tool in integrating digital resources, learning environments, and educational services which play an integral role in advancing educational equity, particularly in rural China. To enforce this importance, the study aimed to identify factors influencing rural teachers' adoption of digital education platforms and to frame these insights as inputs for operational decision-making and engineering design. In formulating the study objective, researchers used the adjusted extended Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT2) model, which incorporates teacher innovativeness, TPACK Ability, and perceived trust as extended constructs, with gender, teaching experience, and culture as moderators. For this purpose, data were collected from 612 rural teachers in China which was analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling. Findings indicate that performance expectation, effort expectation, facilitating conditions, hedonic motivation, teacher innovativeness, and TPACK ability are key drivers of teachers' intention and actual use of digital education platforms. Moderation analyses reveal that individual differences (gender, teaching experience, culture) significantly adjust the relationships between UTAUT2 constructs and adoption behavior. Beyond explaining adoption mechanisms, this study translates behavioral insights into actionable inputs for operational research: the identified factors inform a behavioral modelling framework for policy design, support the development of decision-making models for resource allocation, and provide quantitative parameters for digital infrastructure planning (e.g., prioritizing network upgrades or training resources based on facilitating conditions and TPACK gaps). These findings validate the applicability of the adjusted UTAUT2 model in rural educational contexts and offer engineering-relevant guidance for optimizing digital education ecosystem deployment.