The acceptance of using social mobile application for learning in Hong Kong’s higher education

Abstract

This research paper serves as an extended research of our previous research study in another conference ISET 2016 and the paper title is called “The Impact of Social Mobile Application on Students’ Learning Interest and Academic Performance in Hong Kong’s Higher Education” (Ng, Luk, Luk & Wang, 2016). Using social mobile application for communication is common in this generation and development is driving innovation. Social mobile applications take many social forms depending on a particular application. In addition to Facebook and WhatsApp, WeChat is one of the most popular social mobile applications nowadays especially in China and Hong Kong. WeChat is a mobile text and voice messaging communication service developed by Tencent in China, which was released in 2011. It can exchange contacts with people nearby via Bluetooth, as well as providing various features for contacting people at random if desired, next to integration with social networking services such as those run by Facebook. Photographs may also be embellished with filters and captions, and a machine translation service is available. It is now very common in both China and Hong Kong. This study is to investigate the acceptance of using social mobile application, i.e., WeChat by using the UTAUT model to investigate their behavioral intention and use behavior of WeChat for their learning, as WeChat is the only available social mobile application in China and there are a significant proportion of Chinese students in Hong Kong higher education.