Managing students’ attitude, learning engagement, and stickiness towards e-learning: Post COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has enhanced the role and importance of e-learning systems in learning and teaching activities around the world. Many recent studies have explored the university students’ acceptance of e-learning systems. However, less attention has been paid to students’ long-term usage of e-learning post COVID-19. This study investigates how students perceive the quality of e-learning from different perspectives, and how such a system impacts their attitude towards e-learning, learning engagement, and continued use of the e-learning platform. A theoretical model is developed to conceptualise the differences in students’ perceptions on the quality of e-learning and the consequent impacts. An online survey is conducted using Qualtrics to test the proposed theoretical model. The participants were students enrolled in three Australian universities. In all, 465 responses were received over a month. After filtering the data and removing the incomplete responses, 403 valid samples (86.67%) are obtained. The findings of this study suggest that students’ perception of educational quality of e-learning is a significant factor that simultaneously affects their attitude, engagement, and stickiness. The study also identifies students’ positive attitude and learning engagement as antecedents of students’ stickiness which, in turn, shape their long-term commitment to learning. Furthermore, students’ perception on information quality affects their attitude toward e-learning, and that on the service quality contributes to their learning engagement. The results imply that the use of e-learning cannot be viewed just as simple alternative to traditional face-to-face teaching. Rather, there needs to be a conscious consideration of the adopted online teaching methods and the quality of information delivered through e-learning platform for satisfactory learning outcomes in e-learning environment. Arguably, the results reflect the need of stronger collaboration between different departments in educational institutions towards long-term educational success.