Abstract
The recent use of the mobile phone as a learning tool in tertiary institutions in Ghana has generated a lot of academic interest. What has even become more interesting is how the mobile phone and its usage can be adopted to respond to different educational environments as well as teaching and learning experiences. But there seems to be little research on how students of Wa Polytechnic fully explore the mobile phone technology in their coursework. This paper investigates how students of Wa Polytechnic use the mobile phone as an interactive medium to access educational content to support coursework and the challenges that confront them. The survey approach was employed for the research and a simple random sampling technique was used to select 300 respondents from a population of 1,269 students. The study revealed that 82% of the students use mobile phone to support coursework. The major challenge that faces students as they use mobile phones to support coursework is poor network service. Other relatively moderate challenges include inadequate knowledge in the use of mobile phones, faulty mobile phones, and lack of Microsoft Office applications in their mobile phones. The study recommends the introduction of Mobile Service System Design and Assembling and Repair of Mobile Phones as courses incorporating the use of mobile phones. Mobile service providers should innovatively improve network stability during school sessions for students to effectively use mobile phone to support course work. Keywords: Mobile Phone, Coursework, Interactive Medium, Mobile Service Provider, Mobile Phone Subscriptions
Highlights
Since Martin Cooper made the first mobile telephone call in 1973, the use of the technology has assumed various dimensions
Two categories of the respondents, 27.2% each, totaling more than 50% are of the opinion that training students how to use mobile phone to support coursework and the incorporation of mobile phone in some learning activities are some of the best ways to harness the potential of the mobile device
The study revealed that students of Wa Polytechnic effectively use mobile phones for academic purposes such as storage and retrieval of e-books, taking of lecture notes, taking online evaluation and submission of assignments
Summary
Since Martin Cooper made the first mobile telephone call in 1973, the use of the technology has assumed various dimensions. These features enable them support a wide variety of services such as text messaging, multimedia messaging service (MMS), WhatsApp, viber, email, business applications, gaming, photography, and video Mobile phone subscribers such as teachers, students, make real use of this facility to access the internet for teaching and learning. Mobile phones have a wide range of educational attributes, such as spontaneity, informality, portability, personalisation, ubiquity, pervasiveness and the functions such as voice, text, video, radio, and the internet (Kukulska-Hulme, Evans & Traxler, 2005) These days, school administrators, educators and teachers of higher institutions of learning have come to terms with the reality that students use a variety of mobile technology for various academic purposes. Roland, Andrew & Rachel (2012) assert that the incompatibility of mobile phone applications with academic software like Microsoft Excel, Portable File Format (Pdf) files and PowerPoint application as well as the small size nature of the mobile phone screen are potential threats to m-learning success
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