No abstract

Learning Management Systems (LMSs) have been widely adopted in higher education worldwide, but predominately used as repositories of learning materials. Mobile access to LMSs enables greater mobility and flexible learning, and thus may help boosting non-repository uses of LMSs, maximizing their educational affordance. This study examined the extent to which mobile access to an LMS, Moodle, was used for various learning activities, with a focus on those beyond storing and retrieving learning materials, as well as the factors influencing students’ non-repository uses of LMS via mobile access. A mixed-method approach was applied, with survey responses collected from 316 students and interviews with 26 students and five instructors across nine courses in a comprehensive university in Hong Kong. The results showed that mobile access to non-repository uses of Moodle was significantly less frequent than that to repository uses across all courses, and students viewed mobile access to the Moodle platform largely as a backup to supplement computer access. Findings suggested four inter-related factors influencing mobile access to LMS for non-repository uses, including course LMS activity design, instructors’ attitudes towards LMS, the nature of tasks conducted with LMS, and situational contexts.

Growing use of information technology and communication (ICT) tools in language courses with communication at their core has brought opportunities as well as challenges in the predominantly conventional face-to-face context of the classroom. When the French programme in the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages at The Chinese University of Hong Kong started to integrate an e-learning platform into all language courses, students as well as teachers showed reservations and even disbelief. However, it was unexpected to observe such an interdependent relationship between new technologies and the conventional teaching approach. In this paper, the broad implications of the e-adoption applied to learning French as a foreign language are investigated to highlight students’ learning habits and learning process. The strategies used to make technology act as a facilitator across cultures, and various ways to savoir-faire diffusion are also discussed. The study shows how new technologies modify in-class teaching, while the traditional face-to-face teaching and learning approach can influence choices in the use of different web tools that lead to blended models of education.