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Considering the sudden outbreak of COVID-19, the majority of offline courses have been transferred to online teaching, thus researchers have been conducting substantial studies to explore the advantages of online education. Due to the surging trends of the pandemic, at a time when almost all the schools apply the same online teaching platforms, their carrying capacity and working loads rush to the highest, causing an occasional delay in sound and image. A lot of platforms have been burgeoning to fill the market gap, such as China’s Tencent Meeting/ VooV Meeting (the international version of the Tencent Meeting). Right now, the international version has been applied for remote collaboration in over 100 countries and regions to provide stable and effective online support. It is an assisted tool to strengthen students’ collaborative learning and social presence (www.tencent.com).
Initiated by Tencent in 2019, Tencent Meeting is a real-time, efficient videoconferencing tool. It has been applied to multifarious services since launching, such as online education, digital finance, digital government, telemedicine, and other industries, providing convenience for online office work and learning in times of pandemic. In the educational area, it has provided live-streaming lectures, digital forums and thesis defenses, making online education accessible to a larger amount of people and sharing educational resources more widely. Meanwhile, during the surging spread of the epidemic, remote consultations and online seminars are supported to improve treatment efficiency while reducing the risk of infection. With such a platform, users can join meetings without time and space limitations. It breaks down the regional distance and enhances the social presence and collaboration of individuals, companies, and institutions, thus boosting learning satisfaction and making collaborative learning more effective.
Previous studies about online educational systems focused on a single platform (Asgari et al., 2021; Camargo et al., 2020), while recent technology-enhanced tools enabled students to participate in collaborative activities across platforms. Technology-assisted learning platforms focused on an innovative type of collaboration, which enabled students to collaborate simultaneously in different contexts (Ahmed et al., 2019). Since it was the initial phase to conduct cross-platform education during the pandemic, its effectiveness needed to be explored. We need a sustainable model of online learning to maximize the learning effects of students (Yu et al., 2022a). Since the internalization of new knowledge needs to be achieved through communication and collaboration, and moderate social presence could activate students learning willingness, this study is conducted to explore how to strengthen students’ collaborative learning and online social presence via Tencent Meeting and WeChat so that they can have better learning engagement and outcomes.