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Artificial intelligence and automation are changing enterprise work, manufacturing and the retail business, offering original prospects for organizations to explore, while challenging those that do not adapt to the times. Higher education institutions (HEI) must cope with the same trials, but they are slower in accepting them. Over the last decade, studies have emphasized that HEI are apprehensive about competition from training systems using online learning technology, given that most of them rely on face-to-face training and, consequently, need physical students. But research has also underlined that nowadays, regular students are not only involved in classroom-based instruction, but frequently go beyond it, as they also have the possibility of blending traditional instruction with online courses (Anshari et al., 2016; Gibson, 2011; Kemp & Grieve, 2014).
It is a fact beyond doubt that students enrolled in universities are technophiles by default, possessing unique abilities related to information technology and using technology in a very different way from earlier students. These students are known as favouring experiential activities and teamwork collaboration and they take technology for granted. Staying connected is an important part of their lives, while learning is accomplished through trial and error permitted by the increasing convenience and decreasing cost of use with respect to Online Communication and Collaboration Applications (OCCA). The features of these apps include sharing documents with other individuals, entailing more interaction at group level and increased learning outcomes for students (Cress & Kimmerle, 2008).
Some aspects connected to communication and collaboration are integrated in computer-supported collaborative learning applications and many HEI all over the world do have such integrated internet-based learning systems, thus complying with the constant evolution of internet technologies and innovations. Nevertheless, the favourable outcome of the implementation of these systems depends on extensive knowledge related to the students’ and teachers’ acceptance process.
The present research started from the desire to see the students’ perspective on the use of communication and collaboration technologies in higher education, considering, first of all, that a previous study performed by the authors revealed information with respect to the academics’ acceptance and use of these technologies, and, secondly, that few efforts have actually been done so far in studying students’ acceptance of communication and collaboration technologies (Al-Emran, Mezhuyev, & Kamaludin, 2018; Al-Shihi, Sharma, & Sarrab, 2018), thus leaving important factors insufficiently covered.
Prior studies have not used the term "online collaboration and communication applications" extensively and consistently and many of them have focused on single collaboration applications, such as Moodle, using technology acceptance models. Moreover, no study considering OCCAs as interconnected applications at user level could be found at the moment of writing this paper. In our opinion, the users could use and in fact they do use more than one application for learning (and working), and they even switch from the formal/imposed applications to more informal ones or to other tools they are familiar with and which they find useful for the rapid exchange of knowledge, as confirmed by certain studies, e.g. (Lissillour, Guechtouli, & Zhang, 2019; Martinho, Almeida, & Teixeira-Dias, 2012). Given the technological and cultural shifts over the past few years and especially the 2020 context, internet-based tools have become part of the educational culture and some of them have lowered barriers to new forms of collaboration or levelled them entirely (e.g. video-collaboration and teaching/learning using Zoom/Google Meet-Classroom / Microsoft Teams). Thus, the continuous development of new online collaboration and communication applications for technology-enhanced learning, on the one hand, and the evidence that human action, including technology-based learning, is guided by behavioural, normative and control beliefs that lead to the behavioural intention and subsequently to the use behaviour (Ajzen & Fishbein, 2000), on the other hand, emphasize the growing importance of research in technology acceptance for learning.