Exploring and analyzing the barriers to adoption of ICT in education: qualitative study on intelligent school systems

ICT adoption is one of the main concern of all types organizations including educational organisational such as schools. The aim of this study isto identify the barriers in intelligent school systems and suggest solutions to overcome them. Conducting a qualitative research method, this study, collected the data through semi-structured interviews. Participants included 20 administrators and teachers in Smart High Schools in District 2 of Bandar Abbas city of Iran.To analyze the data content analysis method have been conducted. After organizing and preparing the transcriptions, the coding, conceptualizing, and classifying the data have been done and the themes and categories were identified. The results shows that there are six categories as the main obstacles in developing intelligent school systems. These categories include: (1) barriers concerned to the teachers; (2) obstacles concerned to students. (3)Economic barriers, (4) cultural barriers (5) administrative barriers and (6) technical barriers.The most important barriers is economic barriers that were mentioned by most of the interviewees. Teachers barriers, cultural barriers, technical barriers, administrative barriers and the obstacles concerned to students were the next in rank in terms of importance. At the end of the study for each of the barriers, the strategies for decreasing and eliminating them are suggested.