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In recent years, the rapid development in wireless and communication technologies and market forces have made mobile devices widespread and relatively cheap, with fast and easy internet access, mobility, and more convenience, including with regard to e-services such as e-commerce and educational applications such as mobile learning (m-learning) (Almaiah et al., 2016; Sarrab et al., 2015; Wu et al., 2012). M-learning is galvanizing technology utilization in higher education, enabling the delivery of learning materials anytime, anywhere, and providing a strong opportunity for students and lecturers to engage, communicate, collaborate, and share learning contents (Ali et al., 2012). Furthermore, using mobile technologies in learning environments can offer control over learning, portability in terms of time and place, and wide interaction (Jones et al., 2006; Traxler, 2009). The term ‘m-learning’ has come to encompass all of these attributes in a pedagogical context.
Technologies support learning and teaching are attracting many educators in different educational fields to provide more efficient learning and teaching methods (Virtanen et al., 2018). Many researchers investigated the benefits of m-learning for teaching and learning within schools and universities environments. M-learning has been utilized as a tool to support secondary school students learning basic programming concepts (Giannakoulas & Xinogalos, 2018), to improve students learning ability to discover new knowledge in learning natural science (Hung et al., 2014), learning resources in museums (wang et al., 2016), and learning contents and location information using active learning support system (ALESS) (Hsu et al., 2016). In addition, m-learning is an eminently suitable technology for application in conventional higher education course teaching. It supports collaborative learning, which is particularly useful in language learning as well as its general facilitation of ubiquitous learning services (Alnabhan et al., 2018; Huang et al., 2016; Troussas et al., 2014). It has been used to help undergraduate students learn computer programming (John & Rani, 2015), facilitate learning computing and mathematics courses (Drigas & Pappas, 2015; Oyelere & Suhonen, 2016), and help nursing students in their practical training (Guo et al., 2007; Wu et al., 2012).
M-learning users try to find applications that satisfy their requirements for learning services. In other words, they demand services of necessary quality that improve their satisfaction to use m-learning applications (Kim and Ong, 2005). The quality of m-learning services has been evaluated in terms of the overall performance that affects student learning (Benhamida et al., 2017). The principle idea in learning environments is that the quality of services and user satisfaction are the key factors of successful learning and teaching processes. Quality of service is assayed in terms of users’ perceptions of how good m-learning applications are (Sarrab et al., 2016). Delone and Mclean (2003) indicate that system quality influences user satisfaction towards systems. Many researchers clarify that factors related to system quality play a significant role in successful system deployment (Almarashdeh et al., 2010).