Investigating the voice of customers for m-learning application quality

Abstract

© The Authors, 2019. All Rights Reserved. E-learning has become a new option for learners to access the learning materials and enhance their learning experiences outside the classroom. The flexibility of the technology goes beyond the traditional way of learning and enable learners to use mobile devices as the mean to learn. The emerging of mobile learning (M-learning) provides tremendous advantages for both learners and teachers, while more and more mobile learning applications have been developed and introduced to the market. The current study aims to investigate the voice of customers who have downloaded and used the mobile application. The edX-Online Courses by Harvard, MIT, Microsoft mobile application in Android platform was used as a case study. The M-learning evaluation factors employed in this study are including functionality, security, performance, usability, support, communication, portability, and pedagogical. The main methodology of the study is qualitative approach using text mining to analyze users’ reviews gathered from Google Play website in the past year. The total number of the reviews is 4,200 collected from January 2018 to April 2019. The reviews have been collected as the voice of customers by using web-crawler, and text mining were analyzed by using Nvivo 12 program. The attributes of the m-learning application were then compared with the findings from the reviews. The information that arose from the reviews were categorized into m-learning quality variables, users’ satisfaction, preferences, constraints, and suggestions. The research findings confirm the prior factors essential for evaluating the m-learning application, while new notions have been discovered. The limitations of the study are the limited sample of the m-learning application, and only reviews in the English language were analyzed. The practical implication of the research will benefit the m-learning application developers and the recently discovered factors can be applied to the theoretical implication for future research. This exploratory study aims to investigate the m-learning application from the customers' point of view, while most of the previous study focused on application development. Moreover, the findings also revealed the constraints and potentially useful features that could benefit learners and application developers.