Acquiring Business Skills: The Effects of System Expectancy Mediated by Classroom Interactions in Online Education

The COVID-19 pandemic forced the educational system to shift from a traditional learning pedagogy to a fully online approach (Cabangcala et al., 2021). The realization of Education in a new format has casted doubts as to whether or not curricula and pedagogies developed for face-to-face teaching and learning remain relevant and effective for online education. Hence, this study aimed to determine if the development of business skills (BS) is still possible during the transition from face-to-face to an online learning environment. It further sought to describe the current online learning scenario and identify relationships among performance and effort expectancies (or system expectancy), teaching presence, and cognitive engagement (considered class interaction), together with the acquisition of BS to draw out implications for the improvement of online business education. This study followed a mixed-method research design that utilized a survey accomplished by 703 respondents from a higher educational institution in the Philippines as its primary source of data. The authors used the Wilcoxon signed-rank tests to determine the difference between face-to-face and online learning in terms of skills acquisition and classroom interaction. Furthermore, to support the study's findings, a structured interview among ten randomly selected business students and a model fit test using partial least squares path modeling (PLS-PM) were completed. The results revealed a significantly lower level of BS acquisition, teaching presence, and cognitive engagement in an online learning environment. The hypothesized network of variables depicted class interaction as a mediator of system expectancy and skills acquisition and was found to be a good fit at the 0.05 level of significance. In terms of originality, the study offered an appreciation of the role of expectancy and teaching presence in developing BS, especially since full online learning was adapted during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors explored the mediating effects of class interaction in the online learning environment, the combined impact of teaching presence and student engagement, on the relationship between system expectancy and teaching presence.