Study on factors influencing college students’ motivation to engage with online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

With the widespread implementation of COVID-19 prevention and control measures during the pandemic, online classes have become a normal and indispensable part of college students’ lives. Analysis of the factors affecting college students’ behavioural intention towards online classes will help improve online class quality. This paper sets up a model to analyse the factors that may affect such intentions . The results show that social influence, performance expectancy, effort expectancy, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use have a significant positive effect on college students’ behavioural intention, and enabling environment(i.e. the infeasibility of offline teaching due to the pandemic)has a significant negative effect on it. Gender and voluntariness, as moderator variables, also clearly influence behavioural intention. Based on pandemic prevention and control measures, along with education reform and modernisation, this paper offers valuable suggestions to online learning platform and education administrators.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19 pandemic
• online learning
• behavioural intention
• influencing factors

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics statement

In accordance with local legislation and institutional requirements, the questionnaire could only be carried out after fully explaining the study to the participants and obtaining their agreement to participate. Neither the survey process nor the results will involve the disclosure of participants’ personally identifiable information.

Notes

1. Questionnaire Star (https://www.wjx.cn) is a platform providing services similar to Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Jiangsu University Philosophy and social science research project [2020SJA2204]; Brands major construction projects in colleges and universities in Jiangsu [Grant No.PPZY2015B168].

Notes on contributors

Jing Liu

Jing Liu is an associated professor at the School of Management, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China. Her research interests include social science evaluation, smart library, and online learning behaviour.

Xuanyu Zhu

Xuanyu Zhu is a postgraduate student at the School of Management, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China. Her expertise is in interdisciplinary research of information technology and psychology.

Chong Huang

Chong Huang is a postgraduate student at the School of Management, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China. His research interests include online learning behaviour and digital reading behaviour.

Yujie Wang

Yujie Wang is an undergraduate student at School of Management, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China. His research interests include social science evaluation and information behaviour analysis.

Liyan Chang

Liyan Chang is an associated professor at School of Information Management, Nanjing University, China. Her research interests include social science evaluation and smart library.