An empirical investigation into the perceived effectiveness of collaborative software for students’ projects

Technology has penetrated all aspects of the society in recent years. In the education sector, collaborative software such as GoogleDocs is pervasively used by both faculty and students. This is often because they enable frequent, cheaper and faster communication opportunities. Nonetheless, little evidence exists on the factors that influences its use and effectiveness particularly for students’ projects. Amidst these, many of the studies on collaborative software drew samples from developed countries. Given that technology acceptance differs across geographic locations, such westernized models are less applicable in developing countries. In this paper, a quantitative survey questionnaire was adopted to collect response from 510 respondents. These responses were used to evaluate a research model that had been deductively developed from relevant literature. The research model extended the IS Success model to examine the factors that affect the perceived effectiveness of collaborative software for students’ projects. PLS-SEM was adopted to estimate the proposed relationships. Information Quality, Service Quality and Primary Task Support had significant influence on Intention to Use whereas Self-Efficacy and System Quality did not. However, whilst Primary Task Support, Self-Efficacy and System Quality did not have any significant effect; only Information and Service Quality affected User Satisfaction. Although, there were no significant relations between Intention to Use and User Satisfaction, they both significantly affected Perceived Effectiveness. The results illuminate stakeholders to prioritize user satisfaction to improve the effectiveness of collaborative software for students’ projects. Future research must however explore why certain proposed relationships were not significant. © 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.