Nurses’ MOOCs continuance intention and task performance: antecedents and mediators
| Date | 03 November 2023 |
| Pages | 324-339 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/IDD-02-2023-0015 |
| Published date | 03 November 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Library & information services,Lending,Document delivery,Collection building & management,Stock revision,Consortia |
| Author | Yung-Ming Cheng |
Nurses’MOOCs continuance intention and task
performance: antecedents and mediators
Yung-Ming Cheng
Department of Business Administration, Chaoyang University of Technology, Taichung City, Taiwan
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this study is to propose a research model based on the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) model to explore whether
media richness and social interaction as environmental feature antecedents to nurses’learning engagement (LE) can affect their continuance
intention of massive open online courses (MOOCs) and task performance.
Design/methodology/approach –Sample data for this study were collected from nurses at five university-/medical university-affiliated hospitals in
Taiwan. A total of 500 questionnaires were distributed, and 303 (60.6%) usable questionnaires were analyzed using structural equation modeling in
this study.
Findings –This study proved that nurses’perceived media richness and social interaction in MOOCs positively influenced their behavioral LE and
psychological LE elicited by MOOCs, which jointly caused their continuance intention of MOOCs and, in turn, enhance their task performance. The
results support all proposed hypotheses and the research model, respectively, explains 84.3% and 63.7% of the variance in nurses’continuance
intention of MOOCs and task performance.
Originality/value –This study uses the S-O-R model as a theoretical base to frame nurses’continuance intention of MOOCs and task performance
as a series of the internal process, which is affected by environmental stimuli (i.e. media richness and social interaction) and organismic states.
Noteworthily, while the S-O-R model has been extensively used in prior literature, little research uses this paradigm to expound nurses’continuance
intention of MOOCs in the work settings. Besides, there is a dearth of evidence on the antecedents of nurses’t ask performance in the context of
MOOCs. Hence, this study’s empirical evidence contributes significantly to the existing literature on bridging the gap of limited evaluation for the
research on the impact of nurses’MOOCs learning on their task performance in the work settings, which is very scarce in the S-O-R view.
Keywords Continuance intention of massive open online courses, Task performance, Stimulus-organism-response model, Media richness,
Social interaction, Learning engagement
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Continuing education is crucial for nurses to promote clinical
competence and offer patient-care quality during the nursing
career. However, continuing educationfor nurses’professional
development is increasinglychallenging in recent years because
of staffing shortages, high turnover and increasing workload in
medical institutions (Stevens etal., 2020;Padilha et al.,2021).
Hence, it is imperative for medical institutions to encourage
nurses to use the innovative onlinelearning information system
(IS)/information technology(IT) for continuing education and
professional development. Presently, massive open online
courses (MOOCs) can educate a large number of learnerswho
are interested in the subject matter and able to free and easily
access the online courses worldwide regardless of their
educational background, physical locations and time
constraints and provide them with the way to collaborate
among each other and with instructors from anywhere, at any
time and even without a physicalclassroom (Zhao et al., 2020;
Longhini et al., 2021). For the medical institutions,continuing
education via MOOCscan open a new avenue to overcome the
challenges faced by nurses and provide more nurses with
flexible in-service training via easing the usage and enrolment
wherever lifelong learning is accessible, assuring high-quality
learning and reducing professional development costs
(Longhini et al., 2021;Padilha et al., 2021). Thus, continuing
education via MOOCs is not only one of the most notable
strategies availableand popularly used by nurses to keep up-to-
date in their core professional fields but it can also be regarded
as the most flexible and cost-effectiveway of developing clinical
skills and ensuring the safety and quality of the patient-care
provision (Chan et al., 2019;Longhini et al.,2021;Padilha
et al.,2021).
Although MOOCs provide several advantages that have
caused growing popularity in in-service training and many
educational institutions and this phenomenon has been reported
to date, low completion rates of MOOCs have still been
identified as a notable problem and the medical health-care field
is no exception (Chan et al., 2019;Jia et al., 2019;Longhini et al.,
2021). Thus, the measurement of MOOCs’effectiveness may
depend on its continued usage (Wu and Chen, 2017;
The current issue and full text archiveof this journal is available on Emerald
Insight at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/2398-6247.htm
Information Discovery and Delivery
52/3 (2024) 324–339
© Emerald Publishing Limited [ISSN 2398-6247]
[DOI 10.1108/IDD-02-2023-0015]
The author would like to thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for
their insightful comments and valuable suggestions.
Received 7 February 2023
Revised 30 June 2023
Accepted 15 October 2023
324
Poondej and Lerdpornkulrat, 2020), and it is pivotal to explore
the underlying mechanisms that motivate nurses to continue
using MOOCs, which is a major research topic to this study, and
it is of great importance to nurses’online education and in-service
training making in medical institutions.
Based on the foregoing views, a robust research model for
continuance intention of MOOCs is required. To date, the
stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) model, proposed by
Mehrabian and Russell (1974), has been widely applied to
provide a theoretically better justified explanation of users’
continuance intentionof the IS/IT via examining the impacts of
both environmental features and internal experiences in
different IS/IT fields. Notably, media richness is vital for
predicting whether learners can be actuated to complete a
MOOC (Zhao et al., 2020),and completion rates will be higher
if learners engage in frequent and repeated social interactions
(Sunar et al., 2017). Thus, these two environmental features
may appear in various forms in MOOCs environments than
in traditional distance-learning platforms. Furthermore,
comprehending learning engagement (LE) in MOOCs is
critical because it is often associated with learners’higher
completion rates of MOOCs (Hone and El Said, 2016;Deng
et al., 2020;Sun et al., 2020). Essentially, engagement is often
regarded as a salient factor for elaborating an intrinsic state in
the hedonic activities (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975;See-To et al.,
2012). Thus, LE can be thought of as an intrinsic state (i.e. an
organismic state) in the MOOCs learning process, and more
investigations on the underlying mechanism, including LE for
realizing how to enhance learners’LE that influences their
MOOCs continuance intention are needed (Fang et al., 2019;
Deng et al., 2020;Sun et al., 2020). Finally, prior studies
mostly focus on nurses’perceivedbenefits of MOOCs and their
satisfaction with MOOCs usage (Jia et al.,2019), and little is
known about whether nurses’perceptions of environmental
features in MOOCs and their response in MOOCs usage can
enhance their perceived task performance.Hence, the purpose
of this study is to propose a researchmodel based on the S-O-R
model to explore whether media richnessand social interaction
as environmental feature antecedents (i.e. stimuli) to nurses’
LE (i.e. organism) can affect their continuance intention of
MOOCs (i.e. response)and task performance.
Theoretical background
The stimulus-organism-response model
The S-O-R model offers an underlying framework to test the
effects of external environmental stimuli (S) on individuals’
organismic states (O) and, in turn, on their behavioral responses
(R) (Mehrabian and Russell, 1974), and it principally emphasizes
the critical role of individual internal processing in response to
environmental stimuli (Mehrabian and Russell, 1974;Shao and
Chen, 2021). The S-O-R model has been used in online learning
environments to explain how environmental features affect
learners’continuance intention of the educational IS/IT via their
internal experiences (Shao, 2018;Shao and Chen, 2021). The
use of the S-O-R model as a basic framework is fit for this study
for two reasons. First, prior studies exhibit that the S-O-R model
hasbeenappliedinthecontextoflearners’online learning
behavior (Zhao et al.,2020;Shao and Chen, 2021). Next,
compared with the other models used in existing studies on
examining continuance intention of MOOCs, such as the
technology acceptance model (Wu and Chen, 2017;Joo et al.,
2018;Shao, 2018) and the task-technology fitmodel(Huang
et al.,2017;Wu and Chen, 2017), the S-O-R model may place
more emphasis on exploring the expectation of internal states in
MOOCs usage, and provide a solid model to test the effects of
environmental features as stimuli on learners’organismic states,
and in turn, on their continuance intention of MOOCs (Zhao
et al.,2020;Shao and Chen, 2021).
Environmental features as stimuli
Stimulus is defined as the environmental cues that can actuate
individuals’organismic states (Mehrabian and Russell, 1974).
In the MOOCs context, stimulus refers to the environmental
features of the MOOCs platforms with which learners interact
with other participants by using such features offered by the
platforms (Shao and Chen, 2021). The environmental features
here are defined as the subjective attributes of MOOCs
platforms as experiencedby learners because this study focuses
on learners’perception, experience and behavior. In the
MOOCs contexts, previous studies have indicated that one of
the most vital environmental features of the MOOCs usage,
namely, media richness because the degree of media richness
may affect communication channels for delivering/receiving
information and the speedof feedback, which has been showed
to have a positive impact on users’experience and behavior
(Zhao et al., 2020;Shao and Chen, 2021). Media richness
(MR) theory, initially introduced by Daft and Lengel (1986),
has mainly been used to describe and assess the transmission
capacity of messages containing rich information via
communication media within a group (Daft et al.,1987;Hsiao
and Tang, 2021). MR refers to the capacity of communication
media to facilitateshared meaning and exchangeunderstanding
(Daft and Lengel, 1986;Daft et al.,1987;Hsiao and Tang,
2021). Existing studies have identified four components of
media richness, including immediate feedback, multiplicity of
cues, languagevariety and personalfocus and these components
exert varied impacts across information communication
technologies (Daft and Lengel, 1986;Trevino et al.,1987).
Next, socialinteraction is also a crucial environmental featureof
the MOOCs usage because the lack of interactivity and feelings
of isolation have been recognized as the prominent reasons for
low completion rates of MOOCs (Zhang et al.,2017;Fang
et al.,2019). Social interaction (SI) is defined as the learners’
interactions with instructors and other learners in MOOCs
(Fang et al.,2019). Thus, social interaction mainly includes
learner–instructor interaction and learner–learner interaction
because learners are encouraged to establish strong relationships
with instructors and other learners via their interactions in the
MOOCs learning process, which may cause collaborative
learning to motivate their learning in MOOCs (Kuo et al.,2014;
Zhao et al.,2020).
Two types of learning engagement as organismic states
Organism refers to the intrinsic states of cognition, emotion,
feeling, perception and physiology, which mediate the
relationship between environmental stimuli and individuals’
responses in the S-O-R model (Mehrabian and Russell,1974).
Organism reflects users’intrinsic states of using the IS/IT. In
the context of MOOCs, organism reflects learners’intrinsic
Continuance intention and task performance
Yung-Ming Cheng
Information Discovery and Delivery
Volume 52 · Number 3 · 2024 · 324–339
325
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