Examining Student Behavioral Intention of Superstar Learning System by Extending Its Technology Acceptance Model

Introduction

The outbreak of The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many teachers and learners to stay home receiving online education. Online learning technologies could play an important role in facilitating online learning and teaching. Many online learning and teaching platforms have boomed up to address the educational issue during the pandemic. They can facilitate online learning and teaching via multiple functions. However, the lower completion rates and weak behavior intention of online education have puzzled educators for long. It is thus necessary to design an online learning and teaching technology to enhance students’ behavioral intention as well as the factors that may exert a great influence on behavioral intention.

Superstar Learning System, designed and developed by Superstar Company, is a learning platform where teachers and learners may have access to plentiful educational resources and interact with each other. It is an eye-catching one that has been receiving growing popularity in online education due to its prominent improvements on educational outcomes. Through this platform, educators and learners could obtain plentiful learning resources, communicate with each other, discuss difficult problems, and share their opinions. Students’ behavior intention may be improved, coupled with higher completion rates. Students can also note down the key knowledge pieces and teachers can trace students’ learning behaviors in addition to the supervision of students’ attendance (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

The Superstar Learning system platform

Numerous studies have been committed to the effectiveness of Superstar Learning System in various subjects. Superstar Learning System could improve Higher Vocational Mathematics teaching (Zhu, 2019), promote Physical Chemistry learning (Wang, Zhang, & Qian et al., 2018), facilitate the teaching of Business English Intensive Reading (Fan, 2017), and enhance English Reading teaching on the basis of a mobile pedagogical model (Zhang, 2016). Based on the platform of Superstar Learning System, Wang (2018) constructed a hybrid teaching model of Comprehensive English courses including four elements, i.e. online self-learning, classroom teaching, network interaction, and teaching evaluation. The teaching practice showed that this model combined the advantages of mobile teaching and traditional classroom teaching, which could improve students’ self-regulation and enhance their behavior intention.

While many researchers have been committed to the effectiveness of the use of Superstar Learning System, scanty studies have focused their attention on the influencing factors of its behavioral intention. It is thus necessary to identify the constructs that may influence students’ behavioral intention of this learning technology especially within the framework of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). Therefore, researchers propose the research question, i.e. will performance expectancy, effort expectancy, lecturer influence, peer influence, user innovativeness, interface simplicity, and multiple functions exert a positive influence on the behavioral intention to use Superstar Learning System? This research will develop the null hypotheses based on previous studies, collect data to test proposed null hypotheses, discuss the results, and present future research directions.