Learning Effectiveness and Student Satisfication in Mobile Classrooms

As a rapidly growing social-networking generation enters colleges and global workforces, college instructors and IT managers worldwide inevitably face a critical issue of how to better educate this emerging population who could be rarely separated, even in classroom settings, from wireless networks and mobile technology. Drawing from the notion of tasktechnology fit and various e-learning literatures, we thus develop a research model that seeks to shed light on how mobile technology might shape this social-networking generation’s learning experiences. We propose that courses designed with mobile technology embedded contribute to greater learning effectiveness and satisfaction for students compared to course designs where mobile technology is not embedded. We also posit that these positive outcomes may be moderated by the nature of course with higher learning effectiveness and satisfaction in non-technical courses than in technical courses. Proposed research design, measurement issues, and potential contributions are discussed