Do cognitive, affective and social needs influence mobile learning adoption in emergency remote teaching?

Transitioning to mobile learning or M-Learning in medical education has been challenging due to its subscription to the clinical-based method of knowledge transfer. This shift was accelerated despite the challenges of COVID-19 in what research refers to as Emergency Remote Teaching or ERT. While this modality supported learning continuity, it was evident that online classes have become avenues for students to socially engage with others to meet various psychological needs to buffer pandemic stress. We hypothesized that cognitive, affective, and social needs positively influence learners’ attitude towards M-Learning, which leads to its adoption. Given that peers highly influence medical professionals, we further hypothesized that the beliefs of others or social norms have a positive influence on the behavioral intention to use M-Learning. We added psychological needs as influencing factors to Theory of Reasoned Action constructs to develop a structural model, deployed an online survey, and analyzed 219 responses from healthcare students in the Philippines using Partial Least Squares – Structural Equation Modeling or PLS-SEM. We confirm that cognitive, affective, and social needs are psychological factors that influence students’ attitude towards mobile learning. While attitude can lead to the behavioral intention to adopt mobile learning, social norms do not exhibit a positive influence at a significant level. We discuss our results from the perspective of a developing economy during a pandemic and provide the implications of its findings to theory, academe, and technology.