Methodological Validation Report: Interactive Smartboard Acceptance among Commerce and Tourism Students

The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated an abrupt and total shift in pedagogical strategies, requiring the immediate integration of collaborative digital tools to sustain educational continuity during global lockdowns. In this volatile environment, validating the effectiveness of platforms like Google Jamboard—a cloud-based interactive smartboard designed for virtual brainstorming and sketching—became a strategic imperative for higher education institutions. By conducting this pre-test during the peak of the lockdown period (June 29 to July 9, 2020), this research provides a unique "stress test" for technology adoption models within a forced-adoption, remote-only scenario.The participant profile for this exploratory phase was drawn from an online Personal Branding course at the Faculty of Commerce and Tourism within the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM). The sample consists of 19 usable responses from an initial group of 40 students. While an n=19 sample size is inherently small, the study strategically employed Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). This methodology is uniquely suited for exploratory research and small datasets as it is a non-parametric approach that does not require the assumption of a normal distribution—a critical technical advantage when analyzing localized pilot data.