Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed smartphone use and enhanced the entire mobile experience. AI integration in mobile phones has become a game changer for the future of technology. This paper evaluates the factors that influence AI smartphone continuance usage intention. The study is anchored to technology continuance theory (TCT) with additional factors. Data were obtained from 745 Gen Z from various cities in Metro Manila, Philippines, and examined using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The study found that utilitarian and hedonic value, confirmation, and perceived usefulness had a positive influence on satisfaction, which was the most significant predictor of AI smartphone continuance usage intention. Further, personal innovativeness and attitude of users had a significant influence on continuance usage intention. Surprisingly, perceived usefulness and AI smartphone continuance usage intention had an insignificant relationship. The study contributes as the first empirical investigation of the continuance usage intention of AI smartphones among Gen Z in a developing nation like the Philippines.

Educational institutions orchestrate a variety of in-school events and activities to enrich the student experience. Given their benefits, it is crucial to encourage student participation. With the recent advent of the metaverse, there is an opportunity to engage students due to their inclination toward adopting such technologies. However, the dynamics of celebrating school events within these virtual worlds remain largely unexplored. Our study sought to address this gap by examining school event celebrations in the metaverse through an appreciative inquiry approach. During Valentine's Day, we introduced a special edition of our educational metaverse (i.e., MILES Virtual World) tailored to celebrate the occasion. We discovered that conducting school events in the metaverse requires the integration of real-life social rituals to augment students' social experiences and foster a sense of community. Moreover, the need for realism and the mirroring of real-world traditions in virtual settings emerged as critical drivers for creating more emotionally satisfying and engaging user experiences. The challenge of encouraging student participation in physical events parallels the issue encountered in virtual worlds, where students may feel discouraged from participating if they do not observe their friends' presence within the metaverse. Our study also calls for collective engagement in shaping the virtual world to ensure more inclusive, engaging, and enriched educational metaverses. As we continue to navigate the evolving landscape of immersive digital environments, the insights gained from our research underscore the importance of collaboration, innovation, and student agency in shaping the future of education.

Amidst the clear-cut changes constantly happening in the educational landscape, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are continuously pursuing graduates that meet global standards. The rise of remote jobs from previous years opened a gateway of opportunities for Filipino graduates to ensure employment from various multinational employers. To maintain this, HEIs in the Philippines must be able to offer quality education and programs that meet exceptional standards. This study aims to address the inability of tertiary institutions to track the competencies that the students have gained by integrating the outcome-based education (OBE) framework through an online platform. This paper also enumerates the benefits of having an OBE Management system such as achieving a holistic view of evaluating students' competencies, the system integrates educational data from various sources such as grading system, Learning Management System (LMS), and surveys. The system development research process is conducted in this study. One of the objectives of this study is the integration of drill-down analysis into the OBE Management system. This allows users to create reports easily and faster, furthermore, it aids the country in achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SGD) 4 for Quality Education. The premise of the study also contributes to the impact of system development on attaining quality education for HEIs.

Social relationships are important to human well-being and interaction. Recently, there has been growing interest in how they are formed in various digital media, including social media and video games. Amid the rise of digital engagement, the metaverse has emerged as an essential virtual environment for social interaction. Unfortunately, there is limited understanding of how social relationships are developed and maintained within the metaverse. In this study, we explored the dynamics of social relationship development in a metaverse world. Using a one-shot case study, we assessed the roles of immersion and embodiment, as well as the moderating effect of copresence, in building social relationships through multiple regression analysis. Our findings show that with higher levels of immersion and embodiment, the formation of social relationships in the metaverse is significantly improved. Copresence further intensifies these effects, which is indicative of its crucial role in virtual social interactions. These results indicate that enhancing the immersion, embodiment, and copresence elements in metaverse environments can encourage stronger social bonds among users. Overall, this study advances our understanding of online social relationship formation in the metaverse environments and its design and development.

Energy consumption significantly increased in recent decades, notably at the household level, due to economic development, rising population, and technological advancements. To address this sustainability concern, peer-to-peer energy sharing service (P2PESS) is introduced as a solution to household level energy needs. However, P2PESS has yet to be fully explored in terms of development and adoption. As such, this study attempts to provide an understanding of the adoption intention on artificial intelligence (AI) in P2PESS a developing country. This study is realized by developing an extended adoption intention model analyzed through partial-least squares - structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). Results show that attitude is the most significant predictor of AI in P2PESS adoption intention. This study also reveals that the trust dimension has the strongest effect on attitude, while attitude toward use has the strongest effect on behavioral intention. Also, this study confirms ease of use and usefulness as critical factors in adoption intention. Meanwhile, AI-anxiety is the least significant predictor in the model. Finally, this study is the first evidence of AI in P2PESS adoption intention from the perspective of household level users.

The emergence of the metaverse has expanded the vital role of virtual worlds in education. It extends the traditional configuration of virtual spaces by offering a more immersive, interactive, and social experience. Unfortunately, there is insufficient literature on how to develop a metaverse application aligned with academic standards and best practices. In this study, we adopted a co-design approach in remodeling our mobile educational metaverse to draw a blueprint for existing and future metaverse technology adopters. We sent a follow-up survey to stakeholders inviting free-text comments. This survey focused on the challenges, issues, and expected features from the perspectives of developers, teachers, and students, respectively. Our results revealed several challenges that developers face when building a metaverse, such as technical infrastructure, student engagement, avatar customization, and performance optimization. Meanwhile, teachers emphasized potential issues that may arise from the use of metaverse technology in educational settings, such as learning outcomes, health and safety, digital citizenship, and ethics and morality. Finally, students expected several key features of an educational metaverse application, such as socialization and collaboration, virtual world interactions, metaverse optimization, realistic graphics, and minigames and activities. The implications of these findings are significant and can help other educational institutions seeking to integrate metaverse technology into their academic services. Overall, our study presents an initial foundation for further exploration and advancement within the rapidly evolving field of metaverse technology.

Immersive technologies have generated significant interest across various academic disciplines. The necessity for more authentic, interactive, and immersive artificial environments led to the growing popularity of the metaverse. Unfortunately, not all metaverse types have been broadly covered in educational research. This inadequacy highlights a gap in understanding the potential benefits and drawbacks of metaverse technologies for education. To address this research gap, we created a metaverse called “MILES Virtual World” that embodies the concepts of lifelogging and mirror worlds. Following the principles of the Embodied Social Presence Theory, the application allows students to socialize through customizable avatars and engage in a variety of activities that closely resemble those in the physical world. We adopted a mixed-method approach using a convergent parallel design to evaluate the application. Our quantitative analysis reveals that students feel highly present and engaged in the virtual environment, with a sense of agency and immersion. It also underscores the importance of enhancing embodiment and copresence to create more effective virtual world experiences and opportunities for social interactions. Meanwhile, our qualitative analysis uncovers several underlying subthemes, including avatar customization, identity exploration, virtual items, communication, entertainment, autonomy, freedom of expression, realism, challenges, shared experiences, and a sense of belonging within the metaverse. Overall, our study provides valuable insights into the potential of metaverse technology in the educational context, and how it can be harnessed to create more effective and engaging academic experiences for students.

Advances in technology have revolutionized student recruitment strategies employed by educational institutions. These innovations led to the adoption of virtual campus tours to provide prospective students with an immersive expedition into the school facilities replicated in a digital environment. However, the existing virtual tour technologies pose challenges, including cybersickness in virtual reality and limited interactivity in 360-degree videos. In this study, we fill these research gaps by developing a playable and interactive campus virtual tour where potential enrollees can visit and tour the campuses remotely. In addition to a series of beta tests with enrolled students, we recruited students specializing in game development and their associates to evaluate the application using an extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) framework. In this evaluation, we found that the application was well-received by prospective students and was regarded as useful in delivering an immersive campus visit experience. From the TAM perspective, it was evident that there was a significant difference in how enrolled and potential students assess the application in terms of perceived usefulness and behavioral intention. The positive acceptance of the application led to the recommendation of playable campus virtual tours as a tool for improving student recruitment strategies.

Following recent advancements in automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies, we replicated an experiment four decades ago that utilized voice as an input modality for computer programming. We also extended this experiment by investigating the pedagogical effectiveness of ‘programming by voice’ in terms of attitude, self-efficacy, code correctness, and coding speed. A total of 96 students from an institute of technology in the capital region of the Philippines were randomly selected to participate in a quasi-experimental study using a one-group pretest-posttest design. We subjected students to programming activities with different levels of difficulty to compare voice and keyboard. Our results show that although voice decreases negativity, it likewise decreases control, which means that both attitude and self-efficacy are positively and negatively affected, respectively. Using voice as an input modality also allows students to code faster when the activities are easy but not when they are moderate or difficult. Code correctness analysis shows that voice is only preferable for easy and moderate machine problems. With the deviation of our findings from an experiment four decades ago, we can now conclude that ASR technologies and voice as input modality provide substantial implications and new opportunities for teaching and learning computer programming.

The evaluation process to teachers is a method to ensure that instruction quality has been delivered to various stakeholders. Assessing the performance of faculty members is now an integral part of the educational system as it aims to assess faculty performance using sets of criteria and provide necessary academic intervention program anchored in the development of comprehensive faculty development program. With this, the researchers developed faculty evaluation system integrating decision support mechanism that can provide automatic report generation in terms of evaluation. In addition, a rule-based engine has been integrated as a mean to provide decision support mechanism in terms of automatic development plan. The evolutionary prototyping model was used in the development of the system. Based on expert evaluation result, using the ISO selected criteria, the system recorded a grand mean 4.31 which has an interpretation of “Very Satisfactory” This means that the system is ready for deployment.