Abstract
Though universities are eager to leverage the potential of mobile learning to provide learning flexibly, most balk at the cost of providing students with mobile hardware. The practice of ‘bring your own device'(BYOD) is often mooted as a cost-effective alternative. This paper provides a snapshot of student ownership of mobile devices at a regional Australian university. Our research shows that students do have access to and use a wide range of devices. However, the delivery of learning is challenged when students try to access materials and activities using these devices. Course materials are rarely optimised for use on smartphones, navigating websites and learning management systems becomes a scrolling nightmare, and interacting with other students is often impractical using prescribed systems. Most concerning is that none of the students surveyed were participating in educator-led mobile learning initiatives. The paper concludes with the proposal of some practical, low-cost tactics that educators could potentially employ to begin engaging with mobile learning, leveraging what students already do.
Highlights
The viability and suitability of mobile learning is a topic of intense debate in Australia, where 65 per cent of people own a smartphone, 37 per cent own a tablet, and around a third of the population owns both (Deepend 2015)
Progress in the development and implementation of mobile learning initiatives at the university has up to now been hindered by perceptions that such initiatives would disadvantage students who do not have access to mobile devices, students from lower socio-economic status backgrounds or students who study at a distance; this is a common concern of educators (Handal, Ritter, and Marcovitz 2014)
The survey was designed to identify whether these assumptions were accurate or whether the university would more readily be able to adopt mobile learning initiatives that rely on students bringing their own devices
Summary
The viability and suitability of mobile learning is a topic of intense debate in Australia, where 65 per cent of people own a smartphone, 37 per cent own a tablet, and around a third of the population owns both (Deepend 2015). Given the high levels of smartphone ownership and use among student-aged people, universities have been slow to leverage mobile device ownership to facilitate learning. Maintaining security of the institution’s networks and enabling access by many kinds of device, challenges university IT departments to the point where some disallow access by certain types of device and operating systems (Du and Lin 2012) This is an issue faced by commerce and industry, where employees are permitted and enabled to use their own personal devices for a mixture of personal and employer business (Rose 2013). Given that substantial changes may have to be made to incorporate mobile learning into teaching, many educators cite time pressures as limiting their adoption of mobile learning (Crompton 2013)
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