INTEGRATED COLLABORATIVE TECHNOLOGY: THE CASE OF SOCIAL MEDIA AND MOBILE GROUPWARE

Abstract

The advance of web technologies has made it possible to support an integrated collaborative method that combines social media and mobile groupware into one central system. This study focuses on two themes as follows: (1) To diagnose the causes of students' decisions to keep using online collaborative for student group project tasks; and (2) To measure the potential impact of the suggested the integrated collaborative method as a competent resolution for collective work in the real-life applications. The motivation for this study was driven by several identified issues as follows. (1) The lack of students' continual use of virtual platforms for conducting group work. (2) A scarcity of various collaborative tools with the limitation of task-specific groupware tools. (3) Underused or lack assessment on the suggested integrated collaborative method in the real-world application. A holistic assessment method has been performed to gather supporting evidence to verify the potential improvement of such integrated collaborative method. The research evaluation methods used include online testing and post-session survey (to seek for the factor that sustains students' involvement in online collaborative), the real-world group project experiment and post-session questionnaire together with web analytics (on participants' reaction, behaviours, satisfaction, and feedback), including an analysis of student group project reports and the researcher's own experience (on effectiveness and user experience). The results revealed that mobility of learning is the essential contributing determinants behind the student continuance intention in using online collaborative. More importantly, the analysis outcomes have shown that the proposed integrated collaborative method has worked well in addressing the identified problems and in supporting a range of student group collective actions. Finally, the practical implications, as well as directions for future research, were discussed.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2020
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Dong Xu (Supervisor) & Weigang Wang (Supervisor)