How Do Mobile Social Apps Matter for College Students’ Satisfaction in Group-Based Learning? The Mediation of Collaborative Learning

Xuyan Wang,Dongming Xu,Xiaojiong Wang,Renyu Zhang,Fangqing Tian

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.795660

Abstract

Recently, many universities apply mobile tools to teaching practices. For instance, some teachers may set up groups on mobile social apps and assign course tasks and advise college students to submit papers online. Nevertheless, how these mobile social apps affect teaching practices, especially the process of students’ satisfaction needs to be further explored. To fill this research gap, we build a theoretical model of how mobile social apps’ functions affect course satisfaction from the perspective of Media Richness theory and the Uses and Gratifications (U and G) theory. A total of 186 valid questionnaires from college students in China were collected, and a structural equation model was built to test our research model. The results show that as: (1) only the communication function has positive impacts on knowledge sharing, while the impact of the information storing function and information distribution function on knowledge sharing is not significant; (2) knowledge sharing does not affect course satisfaction in a direct way, but it can act indirectly through promoting collaborative learning, which shows the mediating role of collaborative learning. The theoretical implications and practical implications of the study are discussed.

Highlights

With the rapid growth of the Internet and information technology, mobile devices, such as smartphones, are becoming more and more popular
Our findings indicate that when students use rich media like mobile social apps in group learning, it can meet their needs well for information exchange with members to promote more knowledge sharing, and high degree of knowledge sharing improves the satisfaction of their learning courses by promoting the collaborative learning effect between members
Our results reveal that collaborative learning played a fully mediating role in the relationship between knowledge sharing and course satisfaction

Summary

Introduction

With the rapid growth of the Internet and information technology, mobile devices, such as smartphones, are becoming more and more popular. Contemporary young people are keen to use mobile social apps, which have become a common phenomenon in their work and life (De Zuniga, 2012; Chen et al, 2015; Greenwood and Gopal, 2015; Miranda et al, 2016). The sudden appearance and spread of COVID-19 in 2020 affected people’s work and life, and affected students’ educational practice activities and accelerated the digital transformation of the education industry. This large-scale online education practice shows that the development of digital education needs a good platform as a basic support (Lyons et al, 2021; Wang et al, 2021).

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