Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Future of Teaching and Education, 2024
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Mobile Technology in Higher Education Post COVID
Prof. Maha Mourad
ABSTRACT:
The distinctive characteristics of higher education services, namely intangibility, inseparability, heterogeneity, and perishability have been discussed extensively in the services marketing literature, as have their marketing implications. This higher level of perceived risk arises because, relative to physical goods, services are characterized by higher levels of experience and credence qualities and lower levels of search qualities. The difficulties created by risk perceptions may be amplified in the case of high-credence services which are difficult to evaluate even after consumption. Further to this fact, the shifting of the higher education market post-COVID-19 to the online or hybrid way of delivery increased the risk associated with the perception of the quality of higher education. This paper focused on studying the students’ adoption of mobile technology in higher education and their perceptions of its impact on the learning environment. The proposed conceptual model was developed based on an intensive literature review as well as two sets of exploratory research. The empirical setting of this research is the Higher Education market in Egypt as an example of an emerging market. Egypt is one of the significant countries in the MENA region in terms of population and demand for the Higher Education market. Qualitative exploratory research was conducted to develop a conceptual framework for the perception of mobile technology adoption in Higher Education. The exploratory study started with qualitative exploratory research with the aim of identifying the perspectives of the 4 main stakeholders. The sample is composed of the following stakeholders:
- 10 in-depth interviews with undergraduate students from 3 different schools of business in Egypt
- 5 in-depth interviews with faculty members from 3 different schools of business in Egypt
- 5 in-depth interviews with senior administrators from 3 different schools of business in Egypt
- 5 in-depth interviews with parents in the Egyptian market
The content analysis was used with NVivo software to confirm the proposed conceptual model. The content analysis of the exploratory research of the different stakeholders revealed that there is a good understanding of the different factors that are affecting Mobile adoption in higher education, extracted from the literature, and validated by different stakeholders in the higher education market. It was clear that relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, perceived price level, and perceived playfulness have a dominant role in influencing students to adopt mobile internet while observability is correlated to the adoption but when measured with the other factors it loses its value. Hence, we can explain that the Egyptian higher education market positively perceives and accepts mobile educational technology. The implications of the research focus on enhancing the teaching techniques to create a learning environment focusing on technology and creativity. The empirical recommendations could help decision-makers in the higher education sector to work on enhancing the students’ experience post COVID19. The proposed model should be tested empirically with a bigger sample to be able to generalize. Also, a comparative analysis between different countries will be effective to test the effect of culture on the propose framework.
keywords: Higher Education, Branding, technology in education