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Mobile learning has seen tremendous growth over the years. Like any other software application, usability is one of the key concerns in its successful implementation. There is a lack of study that provides a comprehensive overview of usability testing of mobile learning applications. Motivated by this a mapping study is conducted.

A systematic mapping study was conducted using 51 papers retrieved from the Scopus database published between 2005 and 2022 that reported on usability testing of mobile learning applications.

The key findings suggest that research is expected to expand in the near future. User-based testing is the commonly used method, while data are collected mainly through questionnaires, observation and interviews. Testing is mainly conducted in a controlled environment.

The study provides (1) an evidence-based discussion on usability testing of mobile learning applications, (2) an up-to-date map on state of the art on usability testing of mobile learning applications and (3) providing direction for further research to scientifically strengthen the field.

This study aims to improve the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model by examining technological anxiety and other influential factors on international students' adoption of mobile learning (m-learning) during COVID-19 emergency remote teaching (ERT).

This study utilized the modified UTAUT framework to test hypotheses through a cross-sectional survey method. Participants were university students studying Chinese as a foreign language who were selected using a convenience sampling approach. An online questionnaire was then administered. The data collected from the surveys were analyzed using the partial least squares method with SmartPLS 4 software.

The study examined 16 hypotheses and found support for six of them. The results confirmed that performance expectancy (PE) is a significant predictor of behavioral intention (BI), and anxiety influences both PE and effort expectancy. The negative effect of social influence on anxiety was found to be significant, while facilitating conditions had a negative impact on learners' self-efficacy. The model fit indices indicated a good overall fit for the model.

This study presents a valuable contribution to the literature on m-learning in emergency education by incorporating technological anxiety into the enhanced UTAUT model. Examining the relationships between the key factors of the model provides a better understanding of learners' intentions and can inspire researchers to establish new theoretical foundations to evaluate the roles of these factors in diverse educational settings.

The study found that performance expectations are linked to learners' intentions, and anxiety indirectly affects BIs to use mobile learning platforms. Thus, these platforms should be designed to meet learners' expectations with minimum effort and eliminate anxiety triggers to facilitate ease of use. Language curriculum developers and policymakers should incorporate mobile learning applications to support diverse language skills, address students' needs and encourage their use through professional development opportunities for instructors.

Social factors have been found to significantly influence anxiety levels among learners. Therefore, it is crucial for teachers and family members to play an essential role in mitigating anxiety's adverse effects. Discussing related issues can enhance the quality of mobile learning and stimulate social initiative by providers, ultimately improving the learning experience for all learners, regardless of their location or circumstances. This can also contribute to the growth and development of society.

This study contributes to the originality of m-learning development by proposing an enhanced UTAUT model that considers anxiety and emphasizes the critical role of foreign learners' BIs. It provides fundamental guidelines for designing and evaluating m-learning in ERT contexts.

The use of mobile technologies and learning devices has been increasing in every field of life, and library and information sciences are no exception. This study aims to explore the perceptions of library and information science (LIS) students regarding mobile learning (m-learning) along with their primary purposes, social media applications, advantages, disadvantages, barriers, impact and overall satisfaction with using these devices.

A survey method was used, and data was collected from the students of 12 library schools in Pakistan for a total sample of 250 students.

Their main purposes of usage, their needs, advantages, disadvantages, barriers, impacts and the level of overall satisfaction were also identified. The inferential statistics (t-test and ANOVA) also identified the difference of opinion on the basis of gender, programs, types and number of m-learning devices. Overall, the findings highlight the need for academic libraries to give mobile access (launching mobile applications) to better use library services. To ensure this, libraries must keep an eye on new advances in mobile technology, researchers’ needs and related electronic library services and observe how these services are being used.

Theoretical and practical implications have been highlighted to understand the perceptions of LIS students about m-learning devices.

The mobile library service providers and management need to improve their services by offering services that fit the diverse needs of their users and should know how to attract modern library users.

This study aims to examine the effects of the proposed mobile Web library application (MWLA) on the search experience and its impact on learners’ engagement, interaction and overall learning outcomes within an institutional repository. Furthermore, the study investigates learners’ acceptance of the MWLA system.

The study suggests implementing an MWLA with Algolia’s search service to improve the institutional repository and enhance learners’ access to reliable information. It involved an experiment with 85 undergraduate students divided into experimental and control groups (CGs), where the experimental group (EG) used MWLA for search tasks, and the CG used the traditional library website. The study evaluated the acceptance and learning behaviours of the EG towards MWLA, considering factors such as usefulness, ease of use, mobility, accessibility, satisfaction and intention to use.

The findings of this study provide empirical evidence that the EG, which used the MWLA, demonstrated superior performance compared to the CG across all institutional repository collections, resulting in improved learning outcomes. Participants were highly satisfied with MWLA and found it user-friendly and beneficial for improving search skills. MWLA’s portability and accessibility motivated active learner engagement.

The powerful search bar of MWLA significantly enhanced learners’ search efficiency, resulting in more effective retrieval of relevant materials. Moreover, learners who actively engaged with previews and full-text content, using appropriate keywords and syntax, achieved higher scores and were more likely to access previews, abstracts and full texts of documents using the sorting-by-year or by-advisor feature.

Usability is one of the key concerns in the development of mobile learning applications. The aim of this paper is to design and validate a usability evaluation questionnaire (UEQ) for mobile learning applications.

The UEQ was developed in four stages: selecting primary studies and extracting usability problems, thematic analysis, creating UEQ items and validation and reliability using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

CFA to derive the model fit was computed using AMOS to test the construct validity. The model-fit values were within their respective expected acceptance levels. To assess the reliability of the instrument item loadings, the internal consistency coefficients such as Cronbach’s alpha, McDonald’s Omega and composite reliability were considered. Indicator loadings ranged between 0.735 and 0.933, fulfilling the threshold of above 0.7.

The study provides a novel UEQ for mobile learning applications, which can be used by developers and in academic research to assess mobile learning applications.

With the increasing number of mobile applications, efficiently recommending mobile applications to users has become a challenging problem. Although existing mobile application recommendation approaches based on user attributes and behaviors have achieved notable effectiveness, they overlook the diffusion patterns and interdependencies of topic-specific mobile applications among user groups. mobile applications among user groups. This paper aims to capture the diffusion patterns and interdependencies of mobile applications among user groups. To achieve this, a topic-aware neural network-based mobile application recommendation method, referred to as TN-MR, is proposed.

In this method, first, the user representations are enhanced by introducing a topic-aware attention layer, which captures both the topic context and the diffusion history context. Second, it exploits a time-decay mechanism to simulate changes in user interest. Multitopic user representations are aggregated by the time decay module to output the user representations of cascading representations under multiple topics. Finally, user scores that are likely to download the mobile application are predicted and ranked.

Experimental comparisons and analyses were conducted on the actual 360App data set, and the results demonstrate that the effectiveness of mobile application recommendations can be significantly improved by using TN-MR.

In this paper, the authors propose a mobile application recommendation method based on topic-aware attention networks. By capturing the diffusion patterns and dependencies of mobile applications, it effectively assists users in selecting their applications of interest from thousands of options, significantly improving the accuracy of mobile application recommendations.

This study was based on situated learning, by combining mobile learning and augmented reality, so that students could not only access information content in a real environment but also obtain such information via augmented reality, to support mobile learning.

The research included development of an augmented reality system combined with situational learning, used by students to learn about campus plants as part of the college life technology curriculum. Students took part in mobile learning, and an investigation was conducted into the computer learning behaviour of notebook users. College students were used as the experimental subjects. Data were collected using questionnaire surveys and were evaluated in order to identify the behavioural intentions of learners in outdoor learning activities.

The questionnaire survey covered environmental interactivity, system quality and textbook content. It was found that learners who used mobile learning augmented reality (MLAR) generally managed to browse all the contents of the textbook at each learning location, without spending too much time looking for information, and learners could quickly integrate this into the learning situation. Learners who used MLAR had a strong motivation to study plants at the learning site because they wanted to use the augmented reality technology to observe virtual plant models. Learners who used MLAR in their field learning liked using augmented reality for further learning, for example, using a magic wand to interact with the technology.

This study adopted a new approach to deliver elements of the life technology curriculum, integrating augmented reality into mobile learning. All participating students gave positive reviews of six aspects of the proposed system: their behavioural intentions, cognitive usefulness, cognitive ease of use, environmental interactivity, system quality and textbook content.

This conceptual study investigates the adoption of education technology (EdTech) products among college students, focusing on identifying the key factors influencing the adoption process within educational institutions. Technology integration in education has rapidly gained prominence, with EdTech offering innovative solutions to enhance teaching and learning experiences. However, understanding the determinants that affect EdTech adoption remains critical for its successful implementation and impact. This paper aims (1) to identify the factors influencing the adoption of EdTech by college students (2) to create a conceptual model that shows the connections between the elements that lead to college students adopting EdTech.

The research employed a mixed-methods approach, combining qualitative data analysis and conceptual modeling to achieve the objectives. The underlying knowledge required to create a qualitative data gathering tool was obtained through a thorough literature analysis on innovation dissemination, educational psychology and technology adoption. College students, teachers and administrators participated in semi-structured interviews, focus groups and surveys to provide detailed perspectives on their attitudes about and experiences with EdTech. The Scopus and Web of Science databases are searched for relevant information in an organized manner in order to determine the factors influencing the adoption of EdTech. Second, an extended version of the technology adoption model is adopted to develop a qualitative data-based conceptual framework to analyze EdTech adoption in the Indian context.

Overall, by highlighting the critical components that emotionally influence college students' adoption of EdTech products in educational institutions, this course adds to the body of information already in existence. The conceptual framework model serves as a roadmap for educational stakeholders seeking to leverage EdTech effectively to enrich the learning environment and improve educational outcomes. By recognizing the significance of the identified factors, academic institutions can make informed decisions to foster a climate conducive to successful EdTech integration.

A comprehensive conceptual framework model was developed based on qualitative data analysis to illustrate the interrelationships between the identified factors influencing EdTech adoption. This model presents a valuable tool for educational institutions, policymakers and EdTech developers to comprehend the complex dynamics of implementing these technological solutions.

The findings of this study demonstrated a number of important variables that affect the uptake of EdTech products in educational settings. These factors encompassed technological infrastructure, ease of use, perceived usefulness, compatibility with existing academic practices, institutional support, financial constraints and individual attitudes towards technology. Additionally, the research explored the significance of institutional preparation for embracing technological advancements as well as the influence of socio-cultural elements.

In parallel with technological developments, mobile devices have become an important part of our daily lives. Nowadays, people, particularly generation Z, actively engage with the Internet and mobile technologies, including smartphones. The new technologies have also made electronic learning (e-learning) and mobile learning (m-learning) tempting for learners in higher education. Despite the growing use of m-learning, particularly in developed countries, its utilization in higher education is still at its early stage and far from its potential. This study investigates the university students' acceptance of using m-learning with smartphones in a developing country context.

Quantitative data collected through conducting questionnaires with 405 higher education students in Turkey were analyzed with structural equation modelling.

The findings show that the acceptance of using m-learning is affected by several factors, including perceived enjoyment, complexity and facilitating conditions. The findings are particularly relevant in the current context, where the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed many higher education institutions to adapt m-learning systems to enhance student learning experiences.

This study's findings offer fresh and important insights that can be used by m-learning developers and educators for designing m-learning systems and using m-learning applications in enhancing students' experience and performance with m-learning.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-10-2021-0516.

This research paper aims to provide information about certified learning apps for biological education and gave an ordered list of all learning apps currently used by Austrian biology teachers in the classroom, which should serve as an overview for all biology teachers. In addition, the (currently little known) certification process of learning apps (seal of quality for educational applications) is described.

Online questionnaire for all biology teachers throughout Austria, on the one hand to find out the apps, and on the other hand to research how Austrian teachers find suitable apps. The data were evaluated using descriptive statistics.

A total of84 different learning apps are currently used by biology teachers in Austria. There are two certified lernapps in Austria, both are used. The most common app in biology lessons is “Anton”. The teachers find the information about apps throughout their own research or through colleagues. There are regional and school-specific differences in regards of usage and knowledge about seal of quality. It needs its own teacher training (TT) via suitable learning apps, because problems (data protection, advertising) are sometimes not taken into account during use.

Limitations of this paper are that some of the teachers indicated the apps from other subjects (mathematics) to use this learning app, although this is not possible for biology lessons. Data protection was stated to the best of the authors’ knowledge by the authors, if the authors were not sure it says “unsure”. The participants are mainly women, but this corresponds to the gender ratio, which is typical of the Austrian teaching profession.

The overview of the apps, compiled by this Austria-wide research, can be taken over into the biology lessons of all teachers. In addition, on the basis of this study, a TT at the University of Education 2023 in Linz was created. In addition, the (currently little known) certification process of learning apps is described.

The TT and the overview of the learning apps used serve as guidelines for teachers as to which apps they can use in biology lessons without hesitation. Above all, the aspect of the follow-up of digital media/apps will be emphasized. Data backup, inappropriate advertising must be processed in class or completely omitted. Biology teachers need the right training (TT) and appropriate materials and tools (apps) to reduce problems (cybercrimes).

Currently, there is no prepared list of suitable (certified and uncertified) learning apps for biology lessons. There are isolated recommendations and individual apps, but the selection criteria and backgrounds of the authors are not clear. This list shows which apps (how often) are used by which teachers. In addition, the (currently little known) certification process of learning apps is described.