This study examines the views of undergraduate students in Education Faculty related to mobile learning and reveals their mobile usage behaviors. Mobile usage behaviors include students' view about effectiveness of mobile learning, their mobile design preferences, use of mobile device for purpose of learning, the activity types conducted with mobile devices and their mobile usage frequency. It comes out that university students have very positive attitudes towards mobile learning and they think that m-learning is a really effective learning method. However, mobile devices are used mostly for two purposes: socialization and entertainment. University students agree that mobile learning removes constraints like time and space dependency. They view simplicity and fluency as the prerequisites for a mobile application. Their behaviors are infrequent when it comes to the use of mobile devices for accessing library, reading article, doing homework and note-taking. Their readiness for m-learning is considerably high and they have necessary skills for this learning form.
TopIntroduction
Rapid involvement of the mobile technologies has led to a transformation in various environments like entertainment, work and education in daily life. The transformative side of the mobile technologies can be observed in some terms such as digital native learners, mobile phone addiction and socialization based on virtual platform. This study has mainly two purposes, one of which is to examine the views of undergraduate students in Education Faculty related to mobile learning and then reveal their mobile device usage behaviors. Therefore, the mobile device usage behaviors of university students have been examined in order to understand how they use their mobile devices for seamless learning. In the literature, it has been revealed that students are easily adapted to mobile learning. Examining the students’ ideas has provided an opportunity for making a deeper analysis about mobile and seamless learning. Within the scope of seamless learning, university students’ responses have been analyzed according to following questions:
- 1.
How are mobile usage behaviors of undergraduate students in Education Faculty? (Mobile Usage Behaviors Survey)
- 2.
What do the undergraduate students in Education Faculty think about mobile learning?
- 3.
What kind of applications do the undergraduate students in Education Faculty use in their mobile devices?
- 4.
How are the undergraduate students in Education Faculty use their mobile devices for purpose of learning?
- 5.
What is the frequency of undergraduate students’ mobile application usage?
TopBackground
Mobile learning applications are very useful for learning and they support concept of learning at a significant degree. Unterfrauner (2011) states that the last technological developments have donated mobile phones with a lot of functions making them very capable devices and open the door to a new world for users thanks to the internet access. Mobile usage behaviors of users around the world are shown in Table 1.
Table 1. Mobile usage behaviors around the world
| The number of checking the mobile phone in a day | 119.4 minutes (once in every 12 minutes) |
| Number of mobile apps downloads worldwide | 102,062 million |
| The number of mobile app users worldwide | 255.9 million |
| The number of applications in app market stores | 1.600.000 (Google Play Store)
340.000 (Windows Phone Store)
100.000 (App Store) |
| Average session length in minutes | 4.35 min. (All Apps)
7.5 min. (Gaming)
5.59 min. (Media, Entertainment)
4.26 min. (Travel, Lifestyle)
2.61 min. (Technology) |
According to the data in Table 1, it is seen that people check their mobile phones in every 12 minutes in a day, in other words they spend 119.4 minutes daily with their mobile devices. Also, there exists more than 2 million mobile applications in app markets such as Google Play Store, Windows Phone Store and App Store. However, when it comes to mobile applications, people’s usage is more limited because statistics shows that average session length is 4.35 minutes (Statista, 2016).