Investigating practices and perceptions of higher education students concerning the utilization of mobile devices in their studies.

Learning through the use of mobile or portable devices (Mobile Learning or mlearning), is the type of learning that takes place at any time and geographical location and is supported by a device that simulates computer-like functions. Researches about the use of smartphones and tablets in higher education have studied the effectiveness of mobile devices in learning. Other researches have focused on the percentage of students owning and using smartphones and tablets for academic purposes, as well as on problems or barriers recognized by them in the use of mobile devices, during their studies. Although mobile devices play an active role in both daily life and learning process, research data on higher education in Greece, so far, is limited. Through this research we look forward to enhancing the debate on the use of mobile devices as learning tool and during the educational process in higher education. The present study investigates views of students from the University of Patras on the educational utilization of mobile devices. For this purpose, a questionnaire was created through the GoogleForms online application and was administrated from April to May 2018. This study involved 98 students from various schools, Humanities and Social Sciences (49%), Engineering (19.4%), Economics & Business (15.6%), Natural Sciences (9.2%) and Health Sciences (6.8%). Regarding the use and availability of mobile devices (smartphones/ tablets), we deduced that almost all students possess a smartphone. It is a fact that we have passed from the era of tablets and laptops to the era of smartphones, bearing in mind that the capabilities of the latter are at least similar to those of tablets and many computers. Regarding the applications most frequently used on their smartphone or tablet to support their studies, students stated that they mainly use PDF reader, email, Facebook, learning management systems such as eclass and google. The above applications are used for communication purposes, to exchange academic notes and for course information (syllabus, exam topics, notes). Concerning the problems faced by students in the educational utilization of their mobile devices, the majority of them stated that the most important problem is that in many classes there is no wi-fi coverage and even if wi-fi is provided, the speed is very slow, followed by the lack of suitable applications to support learning and teaching. Most students recognize that mobile devices enhance their flexibility about learning, providing more degrees of freedom to them. They mentioned that mobile devices contribute to the way they learn as well as provide liberty about the place and the time they choose to spend on learning. However, almost half of them admit that using mobile devices could cause problems in the educational process, both for tutors as well as for themselves. The main problem in the use of mobile devices for educational purposes for students are their distraction by aimlessly surfing the internet, and for the university tutors, the fact that some of them are unfamiliar with technology, so that they cannot take advantage of it. Given students' views on how mobile devices contribute to the way they learn, we believe that mobile devices can support distance learning as well. We also consider that mobile applications designers could create environments that mediate the learning process, permitting the mobile usage in class for learning purposes. These environments could restrict the use of various applications (access to specific websites, social media, games, etc.) that seem to distract the student and generally create problems in the educational process. Furthermore, academic staff needs to comprehensively understand the contribution of mobile devices as an innovative tool in the educational process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]