Exploring the Antecedents to Learning Continuance in Virtual Worlds

Abstract

Many education institutes are planning to use virtual worlds to offer distance education programs and to reach potential students globally. However, the success of such programs depends on students’ willingness to use virtual worlds for learning continuously. Students’ learning continuance helps to decrease the drop-out rate of the programs. Motivated thus, this study uses the lenses of the balanced thinking-feelings model and socio-constructivism to model how students’ personal learning and social learning experiences influence virtual world learning continuance. Our results show that the utilitarian and hedonic values are critical to learners’ continuous intention of virtual world learning, and they are influenced by learners’ social learning experiences. Social learning factors are also found to interact with students’ personal learning factors to influence their perceived utilitarian and hedonic values of virtual world learning. The findings provide theoretical implications by integrating information systems theories and education psychology to understand the factors influencing the virtual world learning continuance in a systematic way. The findings also provide educators empirical evidence on what influences users’ learning continuance in virtual worlds.