The role played by the E-learning system is crucial, especially in the urgent need for working away from the universities and colleges such as on holidays, weekends, and during pandemic situations like COVID-19. Researchers have constantly been producing more sophisticated alternatives for effective usage of E-learning systems and among them include models which explain how users accept, use, and evaluate such systems as they use them on daily basis. Due to the low ICT readiness in developing nations like Tanzania, there is a lack of grounds for the inclusion of various factors and dimensions to the conceptual models which in turn results in testing incomplete, intuitive, and ad hoc sets or irrelevant dimensions. This study closes this gap by conducting a systematic documentary review of studies from 2007 to 2020 on E-learning systems to identify the key factors and their associated dimensions. The findings provide foundations that further research on e-learning acceptance in the contexts of developing countries including Tanzania can adopt on formulating hypotheses and generating information on their research contexts.

Literature show that there are limited factors for existing models in e-learning systems’ adoption. This has raised an increasing sensible debate about factors affecting successful adoption of e-leaning systems in universities in developing world particularly in Tanzania. This preliminary study aimed at exploring multiple factors for successful adoption of e-learning systems in universities in learner perspective, using DeLone and McLean (2003) IS success model as a base model. This study was conducted by collecting data randomly, using the questionnaire from students of Open Universities of Tanzania (OUT) with response rate of 0.83 in a cross-sectional study and later analyzed through content validity, reliability, and criterion-based predictive validity. The preliminary analysis shows that there are twelve distinctive factors affecting e-learning systems’ adoption in universities in Tanzania. This finding suggests more empirical research studies to follow it up, to cement and generalize this case and validate the proposed model in large scale. The novelty of this research lies on the number and uniqueness of factors found.