Technology Adoption In Higher Education: An Analysis of Web Usage Mining In Public-Facing Websites

With the 2026 enrollment cliff ever approaching, it is important for higher education institutions to ensure their public facing websites take advantage of technologies that improve their performance and user satisfaction. Web usage mining, the process of analyzing the usage patterns of website users to gain insights into the users’ needs, has been researched extensively in both industry and higher education. Higher education has successfully used web usage mining to analyze e-learning platforms and other student focused applications to improve learning outcomes, however, research about the adoption of web usage mining technologies in higher education public facing websites is lacking. This is surprising as these websites are typically used for recruitment/marketing purposes. This study addresses the lack of research by working to answer the research question, what factors influence the adoption of web usage mining technologies in higher education websites? Combining the Extended Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT2) model and Technology Organization Environment (TOE) framework, a survey instrument is created with the data collected used to both validate the model and answer the research question.