l to r: Professor Ooi, Yun Peng, Dr Garry and Dr Eva - recipients of the Best Paper Award.

UCSI’s Faculty of Business and Management PhD student Yuan Yun Peng together with supervisors Professor Ts Dr Ooi Keng Boon and Associate Professor Dr Garry Tan Wei Han as well as co-author, Dr Eva Lim Wei Lee received the Best Paper Award in the International Conference on Business, Accounting, Finance and Economics 2020.

Their paper was entitled “Pedagogy and Technology Characteristics as Antecedents in Determining University Student's Experience Response during the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Extension of Mobile Technology Acceptance Model”.

Held for eight consecutive years since 2013, the one-day virtual conference was themed ‘Navigating the 4th Industrial Revolution with a Sustainable Development Mindset’. It aimed to provide a platform for scholars and researchers from different institutions, sectors, and regions to exchange ideas and information on critical research issues.

The conference also aimed to bring the researchers together for the presentation of up-to-date work that contributed to new theoretical, methodological and empirical knowledge, as well as promoting research development, linkages and knowledge mobilisation among disciplines.

With regards to what was the motivation behind their paper, Yun Peng had this to say: “The pandemic is a big challenge to our society and has restricted physical teaching. However, from the positive side, a crisis like this does offer us a chance to adopt information communication technology innovations in teaching.”

According to him, as a new PhD candidate, he received a lot of support and guidance from his supervisors. The challenge was to find evidence to support their study. However, they succeeded by providing useful quality data, a solid framework and logical justifications.

Moving forward, Yun Peng said that, future research could also be extended to other forms of mobile learning, (e.g., virtual reality learning, mobile-based internship, etc).

“Yun Peng is a hard working student and has demonstrated resourcefulness. Although he has only been under our supervision for a short period, we are delighted that he is able to obtain the best paper award,” said Dr Garry congratulating Yun Peng on the achievement.