Student Name : Tran Ngoc Bao Khanh IC / Passport Number : B5441817 Nationality : Vietnamese Index Number : 001717 Learning Centre : MBA Institute Course : Master of International Education Term : July 2020 Module Title : Research in Educational Leadership & Management Centre Facilitator Name : Dr. Franco Gandolfi Assignment Submission : August 29th, 2020 Due Date : August 29th, 2020 Status : Active Thesis Title: Customer Acceptance Level on New Products: the case of Gamification coaching for Career design in Vietnam by Career Game Hub. Table of Contents 1. 2. Background .............................................................................................................................. 1 1.1. Gamification in education, coaching, and facilitation...................................................... 1 1.2. Introduction of My Working Title and Career Superdrive boardgame ............................ 1 1.3. Introduction of Career Game Hub .................................................................................... 2 Problem identification and Research Purpose ......................................................................... 3 2.1. Stated problem.................................................................................................................. 3 2.2. Developing the cause-effect map ..................................................................................... 3 2.3. Root issue identification ................................................................................................... 5 2.4. Research Purpose ............................................................................................................. 5 3. Literature Review .................................................................................................................... 5 4. Research Methodology ............................................................................................................ 8 4.1. Qualitative research .......................................................................................................... 8 4.2. Quantitative research ........................................................................................................ 8 4.3. Research model ................................................................................................................ 9 5. Source of Data ....................................................................................................................... 10 6. Research Schedule ................................................................................................................. 11 7. Reference ............................................................................................................................... 13 1. Background 1.1. Gamification in education, coaching, and facilitation Gamification is defined as the transformation of the method for information and knowledge delivery (Dichev and Dicheva, 2017) came to the mainstream in 2010 and became the trend a year later (Dichev and Dicheva, 2017). This was implemented mainly in education by creating a learning experience that is carried by game activities and through which learners can gain knowledge in the gaming process and reflection at the end of the session. The result of this new trend is that there have been many new types of services that create a gaming learning experience. For instance, Lego game has been brought into constructions or creativity courses; the Virtual Reality glasses were applied for teaching about natural science and astronomy; the STEAM teaching method used gamification to design an interdependent unit of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (Shankaranarayanan and Amaldas, 2016). These concepts have been widely spread to many educational organizations, including public schools and private institutions. However, the idea of gamification has stopped at official teaching for students and extracurricular classes for the youth. It was not until recent years that this abstract has been brought to coaching and facilitation (Bahgat, 2016). This concept when applying for the new context has proven its suitability to be the initial move for improving the beneficiaries experiences. In recent years, this new concept has been spread around many international coaching communities to make the coaching process softer and more open. 1.2. Introduction of My Working Title and Career Superdrive boardgame Established in 2018, My Working Title is a Singaporean start-up that works in career designing and activating self-design for the career path of each customer. With the long-term purpose of enhancing the employability skills of people in the community then they could be welldeveloped with their own choices, the start-up’s services focus on gaining the 4S-insight of any individual joining: their Self, their Strategy, their Story and their Situation. Among all of these creative services, gamification is strongly implemented as the key concept to create such a new 1 type of facilitating/coaching sessions to drive the content by 4S (Who We Are - My Working Title, n.d.). Career Superdrive boardgame is the initial product of My Working Title that is heavily applied gamification for career orientation and career designs (Career SUPERDRIVE - My Working Title, n.d.). The game would explore insights of participants through open questions that trigger their thinkings, values, untold story, and their decision making (Career SUPERDRIVE - My Working Title, n.d.). Besides that, the game would help players practice critical thinking and other awareness by providing opinions about other players’ stories. What is more, listening to different perspectives would enrich their insight and may find their answers to current issues. This shows that gamification did the great roll of creating a facilitation atmosphere, from which driving coaching experience in this game. Thereupon, this new approach for career design facilitation and coaching amazed many customers and clients around the world (Career SUPERDRIVE - My Working Title, n.d.). After 2 years, this product appeared in nearly 20 countries and territories to achieve the mission of My Working Title. 1.3. Introduction of Career Game Hub Being inspired by the story, mission, and vision of My Working Title, the co-founders of Career Game Hub decided to bring this tool to Vietnam for leveraging the career orientation mindset in this country. They found the similarities between their purpose and the long-run goal of My Working Title, therefore, a franchising relationship has been built. Coming back to Vietnam, the co-founders established Career Game Hub in the last months of 2019 to spread this new concept in Vietnam communities. Instantly, they received positive reactions from customers and communities that the number of boardgame sessions they held increased significantly. Unfortunately, on the way to growing for Career Game Hub, the coronavirus pandemic has blocked their trait. However, they can still expand its service to provide for clients’ training and have already successfully delivered to 2 clients. This could be considered a good sign but yet to assure the momentum of the development of this institution. Therefore, the co-founders need to strengthen their products and services to have a massive expansion right after the Covid-19 economic recovery. To do this, there should be market research to learn about the current insights and demands of target customers, clients, and then revise the boardgame sessions and training sessions to be matched with their needs. 2 2. Problem identification and Research Purpose 2.1. Stated problem As mentioned above, the coronavirus has brought a new context that has more constraints for the new business of gamification career design in Vietnam. Founded right before the pandemic, the co-founders have just done some pilot activities to test the products’ and services’ suitability with Vietnamese customers. However, there has not been deep research to find out the current demands of target customers and assessment research on the satisfaction of participants with this initiative of coaching and facilitating career orientation. Furthermore, the human resource of this new business is considered to be not sustainable and tough to find the matched pool. The reasons are that they do need people who have a background of certification or experience in career orientation, coaching, facilitating, and training that are quite unpopular in Vietnam, and the targeted candidates should have the same values to Career Game Hub’s missions. One more point to be counted is that the financial unsustainability of the newly founded institution may cause the loss of opportunities during and after the coronavirus recovery. About the business result, there has been slow somehow considered as no expansions of the scale for boardgame conduct both for individuals customers and client training. These issues may be the key constraints for the future development of this new business as it affects the concept, process, results of it. As a result, those could be seen as significant ones which should be solved as soon as possible, however, with limited resources, there should be the order to solve them. What is more, there are the relationships between the issues so if the cofounders can solve the root problem, the others may be easily faded away or possible to find the way out. The more important point is the efficiency of this new method towards customers of Career Game Hub. Shall this concept not significantly create value to Vietnamese customers, the missions of both Career Game Hub and My Working Title are considered to be meaningless and the cooperation is broken. 2.2. Developing the cause-effect map 3 The above-mentioned issues could not be the central ones and some of which might only be the symptoms for the root problem. To clearly identify the relationship between these problems and find out the implicated ones, the cause-effect map would be used. This is the map demonstrating the trait of logic for any relationship analysis. The cause-effect map for the current issues of Career Game Hub would be as below. Source: author’s design. Financial Unsustainability Insignificant growth Freezing economy Coronavirus pandemic Human planing Unsustainability Inadequate Market research Limited social interactio From the map above, it is clear to conclude that all of the mentioned problems came from the new context of coronavirus pandemic. However, it is not reasonable to blame for the context. Instead, what should be done is to concentrate on solving the problems created by this pandemic. As can be seen from the cause-effect map the two main problems from Coronavirus pandemic are the freeze of the entire economy and social activities. These showed that any further investment could be a wrong move since there would be no return on investment, combining with the financial unsustainability of the new business would make it the dawn of corruption. Therefore, other actions should be taken instead of trying to go against the heavy waves. Instead of doing real activities, the team of Career Game Hub could focus on learning about the market: the acceptance level of customers with this new initiative. This move would not create any huge cost and could be the necessary preparation for disruptive growth during the economic recovery, which could solve the problem of human resource planning and financial sustainability in the long-run. However, it turns over a new leaf when the market research required significant effort 4 and human capital to generate, while the facilities could be limited by using online apps for doing the survey. 2.3. Root issue identification From the mentioned points, this is clearly to propose the root issue is doing market research about the acceptable level of customers for Career Game Hub's services. What should be done is drawing the plan for both the process and the human capital to conduct market research effectively. The market research in this context of Career Game Hub would be about the current and pooled customers’ acceptance level for the gamification concept. This would care about many aspects of customers’ behaviors in deciding to use new services or not. Therefore, there should be a welldesigned research model with a carefully revised questionnaire, combining with a feasible plan of data collection and analysis. This would require the person in charge to be strong enough in multivariate analysis. Fortunately, one of the members and a co-founder have strong skills in analyzing data and research design. From that point, this proposal is conducted to provoke the skills and knowledge of them in the next move of Career Game Hub. 2.4. Research Purpose With the issue above, this research is conducted to analyze the antecedents of customers’ acceptance for Career Game Hub gamification services. The research would be held online by survey apps and spread through all of the channels of Career Game Hub and of its clients. 3. Literature Review The type of literature reviewed to build up the research model for this study is theories about acceptance level of customers toward a new product or service. Particularly, the theories of intention to use, accepting technology would be the concept for this research. The rationale for this would be the similarities between the Career Game Hub’’s service with a technology product. Both of them are from the new concept and are innovated to perform better than older alternatives. Moreover, the designs of them focused on the ease of use for customers as the developers based on traditional operation and innovated with some new ideas. What is more, the usage of these requires more flexibility and senses than other previous relatives. 5 Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), which was one of the bases for many prominent behavioral research, was used to predict a variety of behaviors. The theory whose core construct is attitude towards behavior studied the evaluative feelings about performing certain actions. Fishbein and Ajzen (1975) also accounting for subjective norms in the research: considering users’ belief that the most important people to users would want them to behave in certain ways. TRA was extended in the Theory of Planned Behavior, in which included perceived behavioral control. This factor refers to the ease of taking the actions (Ajzen, 1991). Technology Acceptance Model developed by Davis (1989) was another prominent research based on the Theory of Reasoned Action. Fundamentally, the model aims to determine behavioral intention of technology users through two factors: perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness. The former refers to the belief of users that they are required to make no effort to use the technology. Results from (Davis, 1989; Venkatesh & Davis, 1996) and other research such as one of Sánchez & Hueros (2010) indicate that an easy-to-use system would make it more useful to users and thus they would have stronger intentions to embrace the novelty. The latter was defined as the degree to which users believe that technology would be helpful in that it could improve their performance. Considering the digitalization era, in conjunction with the coronavirus pandemic, this model would be helpful in determining the likelihood to adopt technology especially in the form of elearning system (Ngai, Poon, & Chan, 2007; Ong, Lai, 2006; Ong, Lai, & Wang, 2004). The results of these studies indicated that TAM could efficiently predict and explain users’ acceptance of information technology systems. Nevertheless, as behavioral study would be complex, the model was stated to be quite general in evaluating the likelihood of technology adoption (Tarhini, Hone and Liu, 2013). Therefore, it was elaborated in later research with added factors. For example, the TAM 2 added the subjective norm factor adapted from TRA. Moreover, Tarhini, Hone and Liu (2013) included quality of work life, Wu and Gao (2011) perceived enjoyment, Hsu and Chang (2013) perceived convenience, and Liu et al. (2010) perceived interaction, extending TAM to apply the model in the education field. The descendant researches further develop the TAM by specifying the system factors that lead to perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness. Ngai, Poon and Chan (2007) found out that 6 technical support imposed a direct effect on both perceptions. Online course design, and user interface design were also demonstrated to be the most significant factor to perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use, respectively (Liu et al., 2010). Another stand of user acceptance was the UTAUT model, which was established from the unification of the three mentioned models, TRA, TPB, and TAM, and other five models, namely, MPCU, IDT, SCT, MM, and C-TAM-TPB. By analyzing all the proposed factors in the eight models, Venkatesh, Morris, Davis and Davis (2003) constructed the model of direct determinants of behavior intention. All of them, performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions, are moderated by gender, age, voluntariness, and experience. Performance expectancy shares similarities in the literature with the perceived usefulness (TAM/TAM2 and C-TAM-TPB), extrinsic motivation (MM), job-fit (MPCU), relative advantage (IDT), and outcome expectations (SCT). The relationship between performance expectancy and intention was pointed out to be moderated by gender and age. Minton and Schneider (1980) explained that men usually were task-oriented and thus strongly expected the technology to be helpful. Similar to gender, young people typically are more ambitious in their career, so they would have higher expectations for technology in terms of performance (Venkatesh, Morris, Davis and Davis, 2003). Effort expectancy refers to the ease of use of the system, whose definition is similar to that of perceived ease of use (TAM/TAM2), complexity (MPCU), and ease of use (IDT). This factor was proven to be more significant for women than for men, for the older generation than for the younger, and in the early stages of a new behavior with no or less experience (Venkatesh, Morris, Davis and Davis, 2003). Social influence was defined the same as the subjective norm in TRA, TAM2, TPB/DTPB and C-TAM-TPB, social factors in MPCU, and image in IDT. This determinant was considered to have all the four moderators, which indicated that the effect was stronger for women, older workers, under conditions of mandatory use, and with limited experience (Venkatesh, Morris, Davis and Davis, 2003). Facilitating conditions are an important factor in terms of removing barriers of adopting new behaviors, which is also aligned with the model of change proposed by Kotter (1996) in which he demonstrated how to encourage people to form a new habit. Facilitating factor, which was not 7 included in the Technology Acceptance Model 2 but in the Theory of Planned Behavior, refers to the belief of users on the availability of organizational and technical infrastructure supporting use of the system. It was proven to be non-significant to behavioral intention, given the availability of effort expectancy (Venkatesh, Morris, Davis and Davis, 2003). 4. Research Methodology 4.1. Qualitative research The author investigated and collected many reports, newspapers, researches from online and offline sources about the acceptance of new products or technology. Among that knowledge, the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) demonstrated the suitability with the concept of this acceptance research for the service of Career Game Hub. Besides that, the author also asked for permission to access previous reports of My Working Titles about the acceptance level and time of customers around the world. From all of them, the author filtered all matching insights and knowledge to revise for building the research model. 4.2. Quantitative research According to the Marketing Research book published by Malhotra, the research process would include some of the steps as issue identification, model and questionnaire design, data collection and analysis, hypotheses testing, conclusion, and recommendation. This research would follow the above structure. Particularly, the detailed process would be as below. 8 Source: author’s design. The three first steps: issue identification, literature review, proposing the research process, and research model have been done in this proposal so far when other steps will be made during the actual research project. As can be seen from the process, this research would be based mostly on data analysis, thereafter, the questionnaire should be designed carefully. This step should be in sync with the data analysis methodology. This will reduce the waste of resources caused by wrong directed measurement questions. 4.3. Research model The model would be based on the questionnaire of the Technology Acceptance Model and Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology models, then be paraphrased to suit the concept of Career Game Hub. In particular, all of the factors mentioned in the TAM theory and UTAUT model would be used for this model. The dependent factor is the Intention to Use for service of Career Game Hub when the independent factors are Perceived Ease of Use of service, Perceived Usefulness of service, Attitude toward career design’s importance, Subjective norm of customers, and Social Influence on customers. The factors of Perceived Ease of Use and Perceived Usefulness are inherited from the Technology Acceptance Model while Attitude toward a career’s importance is taken from the Theory of Planned Behavior and Theory of Rational Actions. Meanwhile, the Subjective norm and Social Influence on the customer come from the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology. Furthermore, the dependent factor’s concept would be revised from all mentioned 9 theories. The questionnaire of these factors will not only be built from these theories but also from the previous researches that have the similar topics in Vietnam and around the world, for example, the research of Hong-bumm Kim, Taegoo (Terry) Kim and Sung Won Shin about customers’ acceptance of airline eCommerce websites. The following demonstration stated the research model of this study. Perceived Ease of Use Perceived Usefulness Intention to use Attitude toward career design Subjective norm Social Influence Source: author’s recommendation. 5. Source of Data The author suggested Malhotra's methodology of exploratory factor analysis that is considered suitable with the recommended model. The plan of data analysis would be as below: Sampling method: According to Bollen in 1989 suitable sample quantity if the minimum sample size is 5 samples per quantitative. This research has 5 independent variables and 1 dependent variable, each of the variables would have averagely 4 questions. Therefore, 10 the minimum sample quantity is 6x4x5 = 120 samples. To assure the result, this research will be surveyed with a sample size of around at least 170 (120 + 50). The sample selection method is a utility of definition, which means anyone who belongs to the subject’s decimal data and accepts the survey reference can become the sample. Data analyzing: After the data has been collected from the survey, the statistical software SPSS 20 will be used to process the data, run the model, and test. The statistic is to describe collected data and satisfaction level of pooled customers of Career Game Hub. Exploratory factor analysis method EFA: All the variables would be tested by exploratory factor analysis EFA. In this method, the coefficients used are Principal components with Varimax rotation. Some criteria when conducting exploratory factor analysis EFA are: KMO coefficient, Eigenvalue, factor loading, and total variance extracted. The scale is accepted when the total variance extracted is ≥ 50% while Factor loading should be > 0.5 to be significant. Similarly, when extracting factors, the Eigenvalue should be ≥ 1, and KMO coefficient must be ≥ 0.5 and ≤ 1 (0.5 ≤ KMO ≤ 1). Cronbach's Alpha's Confidence Coefficient Method: To determine the reliability of the scale, Cronbach's Alpha coefficients are used to test the reliability of the scale, from which mismatched variables will be eliminated. The observed variables of the scales achieve reliability when Cronbach's Alpha ranges from 0.6 to 0.9 and the total item-total coefficients > 0.3. Thus, any variable that has the item-total coefficients less than 0.3 will be excluded from the scale because they are considered non-conforming. Regression analysis: this is the analysis to test the relationships stated in the research model, from which tests the suitability of the model. 6. Research Schedule To assure the process of research would be well-conducted, there should be a schedule to define milestones and timeline for each workload. The plan would stick to the proposed research to generate everything precisely. The plan would follow the Gantt Chart template Gantt Chart: (The Ultimate Guide (with Examples) - ProjectManager.com, n.d.). In this plan, the co-founder (A) would care about issue identification and decision making for the entire research project, while there would be a member who cares for data analysis and questionnaire design (B). 11 Milestones Break-down steps Person Start date Deadline Status 25/8/2020 29/8/2020 Done 30/8/2020 4/9/2020 in charge Issue identification Issue A identification Literature review A Proposing A&B research process Model and Research model A&B Questionnaire B Questionnaire design design On progress Data collection and Data collection B 5/9/2020 12/9/2020 Reliability test B 15/9/2020 16/9/2020 Exploratory factor B 15/9/2020 Regression test B 15/9/2020 Hypotheses Hypotheses test B 17/9/2020 Conclusion and Result conclusion A&B 17/9/2020 analysis analysis 18/9/2020 Recommendations Recommendations A 19/9/2020 22/9/2020 and next step Source: author’’s recommendation From this plan, the team could estimate the workload to calculate compensations for the human capital and also foresee the risk could happen and plan for the solutions. 12 7. 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