Students’ Expectations from Mobile Devices for Mobile Learning

Abstract

Mobile devices are becoming ever more widely available, with growing functionality, giving students access to educational material anytime and anywhere. Thus, mobile devices have become more attractive for education. However, owing to the nature of mobile devices, such as small screen size, it poses number of challenges to create a usable learning environment. Therefore, it becomes noteworthy to explore usability of these devices and the students' expectations. The present empirical study regarding the use of personal digital assistants (PDAs) aimed to explore expectations of students from mobile devices in order to support mobile learning. Data was collected from 30 university students through pre and post interviews while students were conducting a set of e-learning actions, such as uploading files, communicating and acquiring course contents, on a mobile device. With the analyses of interviews using constant comparative approach, expectations of the students were classified into 11 categories which are related to interaction and usability.