Can COVID-19 pandemic influence experience response in mobile learning?

Abstract

The mass spreading of COVID-19 has changed the paradigm of the education industry. In China and many other nations, universities have introduced compulsory remote education programs such as mobile learning (m-learning) to prevent public health hazards caused by the pandemic. However, so far, there is still a lack of understanding of student’s learning experience responses in compulsory m-learning programs. As such, there is a necessity to explore the factors and mechanisms which drives students’ experience. This paper evaluates the influence of both pedagogy and technology on learner’s compulsory m-learning experience response (ER) by extending the mobile technology acceptance model (MTAM) during the COVID-19 pandemic. An online self-administered questionnaire was used to collect the data, which was then analysed through SmartPLS 3.2.9. Importance-performance matrix analysis was applied as a post-hoc procedure to gauge the importance and performance of the exogenous constructs. The results revealed that perceptions of m-learning’s learning content quality, user interface, and system’s connectivity affect the perceived mobile usefulness and easiness which in turn affects ER. This paper validates MTAM in the field of education by integrating MTAM with pedagogy and technology attributes under a social emergency setting such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, the current research explains users' ER rather than behaviour intention which is commonly adopted in past studies.