Moderating Effect of Faculty Status in the Relationship between Attitude, Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, Behavioral Intention, Subjective Norms on Mobile Learning Applications

Abstract

The internet and mobile applications have added radical changes in every sphere of existence including higher education. Consequently, universities have taken the lead in harnessing the technological developments of the internet in instructional and research activities. Few empirical research, notably in the Middle East, have looked into the use of mobile applications in educational contexts. The goal of this research is to investigate the moderating effect of faculty status in the relationships between attitudes, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, behavioral intention and subjective norm toward using mobile learning applications in some universities in the UAE, with an understanding of mobile applications and its usage for learning. There are 141 students and 86 instructors from five selected UAE universities have been used for this research. Different criteria have been investigated to see if there is a substantial difference in attitudes between students and instructors towards the use of mobile applications. Results show that behavioral intention, subjective norms, and attitude are significant predictors of mobile applications. Faculty status moderates the link between Perceived Ease of Use  (r = .301, p = .000), Behavioral Intention (r = .654, p = .000) and Subjective Norm (r = .606, p = .000) with mobile application, according to the findings. This study concluded that behavioral intention has the highest significant contribution to mobile application learning compared to subjective norms and attitude respectively. Faculty members are more likely to perceive ease of use and subjective norms than students, while students are more likely to have behavioral intention towards mobile application learning.