The Opportunities and Challenges in using Mobile Phones as learning tools for Higher Learning Students in the Developing Countries: Zanzibar Context Haji Ali Haji Department of Computer Science The State University of Zanzibar Zanzibar, Tanzania
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Abdalla Abu Shaame Department of Computer Science The State University of Zanzibar Zanzibar, Tanzania
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Abstract The purpose of this paper is to discuss the opportunities and challenges of mobile learning among Higher Learning Students (HLS) in developing countries of Zanzibar context. In the current era of advanced technology, mobile learning represents exciting new frontiers in education. It becomes feasible and offers new benefits to students. The study builds on the experiences of students from three higher learning institutions in Zanzibar which were assumed to be representative of others learning institutions in developing world particularly in Africa nations which have similar learning environments. The paper begins by reviewing numerous cases of mobile learning which were conducted in several countries. Data was collected through case studies and questionnaires so as to get the students view points on their experience of mobile learning. It was found that students are aware of mobile technology and they are motivated to use their phones in order to facilitate their learning. The study observed that there are many opportunities for students to adopt mobile learning and that it encourages them to be self-motivated and increases their engagement with learning behaviour. On the other hand, high cost of mobile devices and poor bandwidth within the higher learning institutions are among the mentioned challenges This is the first study conducted in HLS in Zanzibar which with the mentioned of opportunities and challenges posed use by the mobile phones in learning within developing world. The research findings would be of significance in assisting the students in their studies. Consequently educators will help to distribute teaching materials efficiently. Key words: opportunities, challenges, mobile learning, higher learning students
I.
INTRODUCTION
The endless growth of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) greatly simplifying the learning environment to students, hence the growth of mobile phone technology makes social services such as learning, news, weather forecast and others to be easier accessible where ever network coverage is present. Unlike traditional form of learning, mobile learning has not so far been studied as a phenomenon in the world. Rather it has been introduced as a new technology-led practice that will potentially lead to new learning phenomena and brings the benefit in teaching and learning for students [1][2]. Due to the high availability of mobile phones, mobile technology allows anyone to access internet anywhere and at any time.
Omar Haji Kombo Department of Computer Science The State University of Zanzibar Zanzibar, Tanzania
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In the developing world, mobile phones have become an important tool not only in day-to-day communication but also in education activities. Students use mobile phones for accessing learning materials which are available in different sources to facilitate their studies and undertaken discussion. Students do not have to wait for access to university’s computer to learn. They can access learning material through their phones. Mobile phones are more popularly available with reasonable price for university students compared to laptops, palm tops and desk tops [3][4]. Research conducted by Thornton and Houser [5] in Japan observed that students were willing to use their phones in learning activities. The study found that most of the students’ phones had different features that support mobile learning. On the other hand, in several developing nations including Zanzibar most of students’ phones have not features that enabled them to easy access the learning materials. Furthermore, the research of Samuels [6] conducted in Norway, which aimed to encourage communication between students and teacher with the use of mobile devices. The study revealed that students were free to access the learning material at home or any other places where network connections are available. This increased their understanding because they were able to communicate with instructor whenever when they got stuck. However, there are some difficulties were identified during Samuels study such as small screen size which caused un compatibility of web application. Despite of these challenges, the Samuels’s study observed that both students and instructor were benefited with mobile learning applications. The students were easy provided learning materials and on time, it is also enabled instructor to integrate teaching without enter to the classroom. Students were abled downloading the learning materials at any time as soon as after instructors uploaded them. A number of researches have been carried out around the world illustrating the opportunity of mobile phones in learning, many of which stalk the rapid advances in ICT and rapid penetration of internet in human activities. The majority of these studies demonstrate that there are benefits of use the mobile phones in learning applications. This paper discusses the opportunities and challenges of using mobile phones as learning tools for Higher Learning Students (HLS) in the developing countries of Zanzibar context.
II.
MOBILE PHONE FOR EDUCATION
Mobile learning is the use of wireless and mobile technologies to facilitate, support, enhance and extend learning and teaching. In the recent years wireless mobile technology has been used to enhance teaching and learning process in Higher Learning Institutions (HLI) in both developed and developing countries. The learning process is closely linked to the concept of mobility and facilitates gathering of student’s response quickly and anonymously [7][8]. Meanwhile, using mobile phones in HLI will expose students to good studying environment with several opportunities such as easy accessing learning materials, discussions, taking assessments, peer share and supporting. Mobile phones in learning have many important characteristics which attract students in modern educational perspective, including increasing portability, ubiquity, personal ownership, social interactivity, connectivity and personalization [9]. Furthermore, mobile technology provides delivery of context based knowledge, eliminates barriers of location and time to be in class rooms. The materials can be accessed remotely and shared at any time which in turn helps to boost the self-managed learning, whereby students can get immediate feedback to their questions. Despite of many benefits of applying mobile phone in education, there are some challenges that facing the mobile learning in the developing countries like Zanzibar. Device variability, slow down load speed and limited internet access, small screen size with poor resolution, colour, and contrast; and limited memory are among the challenges of mobile learning in education as pointed out by Elias [10]. III.
METHODOLOGY
The researchers decided to use case study and questionnaires as the data collection techniques. According to Kothari [11] case study may be used as a starting point and it gives direction and structure to set of questions the researchers asked. On the other hand, Kothari also stated that, questionnaire is easily customizable and the manner of its construction is easy to follow which is only very practical in the nature of the research. Responses of a questionnaire are objectified and standardized thus allowing responses to be entered and tabulated easily thus is the only way to avoid biases in our research [12][13]. The questionnaires were distributed to three Universities in Zanzibar namely, the State University of Zanzibar (SUZA), University College of Education Zanzibar (UCEZ) and Zanzibar University (ZU). The questionnaire was well organized and contained three parts. First part of questionnaire consisted of items that asked respondents about their demographic data. Second part was consisted of the awareness of mobile technology and third part was asked about awareness of use the mobile phone in learning system. The questions were measured on different scale; there are items measured by Yes/No and not sure scales and others were measured by multiple attributes selection.
A sample size of 106 students was randomly selected from those three Universities. Even though, the only 101 questionnaires were completed and collected, however five (5) questionnaires were not collected, due to some respondents refuse to continue and some of them were not marked properly. Meanwhile, the percentage of collected questionnaire is 95% compared to uncollected questionnaire which is 5%, therefore according to Bryman and Cramer [14] and McGiven [15] 90% of the results from respondents are more than enough to make estimates about the entire population. IV.
FINDINGS FROM QUESTIONNAIRE AND CASE STUDY
The finding results from questionnaire were represented in the form of tables in order to demonstrate the categorical data and to illustrate descriptive values. The results of the questionnaires were presented clearly in the tables’ format and analysed in the following subsections. A. Characteristics of Respondent’s Demographic Data Table 1 shows the demographic characteristics of the respondents. The result shows that most of the respondents who participated in the questionnaire 63% were male compare to the 37% of female. Furthermore the data finding shows that 40% of respondents who answer the questionnaires were from the SUZA, 34% from ZU and 26% of respondents were from UCEZ. It was also found that most of respondents (51%) were Bachelor Degree students, 36% were Diploma Students and 13% were Certificate Students. TABLE 1: CHARACTERISTICS OF RESPONDENT’S DEMOGRAPHIC DATA Variable
Attribute
Percentage (%)
Gender
Male
63
Female SUZA
37 40
ZU
34
CU
26
Bachelor Degree
51
Diploma
36
Certificate
13
Learning Institution
Academic Qualification
B. Awareness of Mobile Technology Table 2 represents the results of findings towards awareness of mobile technology in learning. The majority of respondents (91%) found posses’ mobile phone and only 9% of respondents do not possess the mobile phone. Furthermore, the result found that, most of the respondents who possess mobile phone, 80% have normal cell phone, while 11% of the respondents have Smart phone and 9% of them own Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). In addition, the result found that 33% of respondents were mostly use call service (dialling) to communicate with friends and families, 41% of the them were mostly use SMS service, while 14% of the respondents were suffering internet and only 12% of them were use their phone for reading and learning activities.
TABLE 2: AWARENESS OF MOBILE TECHNOLOGY Variable
Attribute
Percentage (%)
Belong Mobile Phone
Yes
91
No
9
Not sure
0
Cell Phone
80
PDA
9
Smart Phone
11
Most use service in
Dialling
33
mobile phone
SMS
41
Browsing Internet
14
Reading e-books
12
Type of Mobile Phone
TABLE 3: USE OF MOBILE PHONE IN LEARNING Variable
Attribute
Percentage (%)
Mobile Phone in Learning
Yes
87
No
0
Not Sure Most of the time
13 9
Rare
30
Never
61
Yes
78
No
7
Not Sure
15
Often use of Mobile Phone in Learning
Mobile Learning in Institution
D. Wide spreading of Mobile Phone This study is far differing from the study conducted by Thornton and Houser [5] who found that all students (100% of the respondents) have mobile phone and about 99% of students reported were using mobile phone for sending email on their mobile phone, with only 1% sending email from PCs. In their study also found about 80% of students reported were using PDA which is highly differing from HLS whereby the only 9% of the respondents were using PDA. This shows that welfare of the developed country students are very difference to the developing countries. In addition, the Japanese survey found that about 61% of the respondents were using their mobile phone for web function such as browsing and searching educational materials, although large number (85%) were using for charting with friends and family. This show that the Japanese students were more successful benefited with mobile technology compared to the majority of developing countries’ students. It help them in their studies compared to the HLS in the developing nations who are not use mobile phone for learning instead they use for messaging, dialling and other entertainment activities. However, this could be highly contributed by the level of technology and mobile phone accessed by these two populations. C. Use of Mobile Phone in Learning The results of survey obtained on the use of mobile phones in the HLS found that, the majority of respondents 87% were positively agreed that the use of mobile phone may assists in their studies as shown in Table 3, while 13% of the respondents were not sure on that service and no one disagreed with that question. On the second side, the researchers wanted to know how often the students use their mobile phone in the learning activities. The results reveals that only 9% of respondents were mostly use their phones in learning activities, whereby the majority of respondents (61%) never use their mobile phones in learning purposes, and 30% of them were rare use their phones in learning purposes. In addition, 78% of respondents agreed to the idea of establishment of mobile learning in the high level institutions which will help students to facilitate their learning, 7% of them did not agree with that idea and 15% were not sure about mobile learning system.
The findings from case study show that, the access and use of mobile phone in education has increased dramatically over the past decade in developing nations [16]. Case of Nigeria, Ghana and Cote D’lvoire found that mobile penetration has been growing at a phenomenal pace over the past five years. The mobile subscriptions for these three countries exceed 130 million. The report also revealed that in West Africa, mobile internet use has grown significantly in recent years to reach penetration levels almost equal to fixed line use for the first time [17]. There is also rapid penetration of use mobile phone in South Africa. The research commissioned by infoDev, a global partnership program within the World Bank group found half of the 50 million people in South Africa live below poverty line, more than 75 percentage among those in low income groups who are above 15 years own mobile phone and more than 98.5 percentage of the country’s population has access to telephone due to the widespread use of cellular telephones [18] Therefore, based on the research findings conducted in the HLS, majority of the students are interested in adaption of mobile learning in their studies. Hence, it is also found that the use of mobile phones as a learning tool is more flexible compared to desktop computer. However, there are some confronts towards the establishment of mobile learning in such that Zanzibar as we illustrated in below subsections. V.
OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES
For the HLS to benefit more from their mobile phones, it’s important to gain massive opportunity of this technology and overcome challenges associated with the mobile learning environment. This paper presents realistic reasons for embedding mobile learning to engage developing countries’ students in collaborative, communicative, creative and easy accessible learning environment as well as the challenges and how to overcome those challenges. A. Opportunities of mobile learning Encouraging Student – Centred learning: Students can access resources according to their needs rather than their teachers or other people’s involvement. It focuses on student’s interests, learning styles, motivations and abilities. Students also acquire effective learning skills that will be
valuable throughout their lives, whereby they will more active and feel ownership of the learning process. Mobility: The ability to link to the activities in the outside world also provides students with the capability to ‘escape’ the classroom and engage in activities that do not correspond with either the teacher’s agenda or the curriculum. Affordance of the device: Mobile phones are much affordable than desktop and laptop computers. It shows that HLS were not able to purchase expensive mobile phone devices which have enough capability to support mobile learning. This study found that more than 91% of the respondents have their own cell phones of different types and models. About 11% of the respondents have a smart phone and very little amount (only 9%) that have a PDA. Increase engagement and motivation of learning behaviour: Mobile phone is a small device which is very dedicated in such way that the user can play around in his/her hands easily. In this study, most of the students agreed the initiative of mobile learning system will facilitate their studies. This shows that although students were not lodged in the use of mobile phones in their learning, they still agreed to the fact that mobile learning will have large contribution in their studies. Thus appropriate measures need to be taken for the government and other stake holders to assist our students to have modern mobile learning tools such as smart phone, PDA and other tools to support their studies. B. Challenges of mobile learning Students and parents cannot afford to buy PDAs and Smart phones: The effective use of mobile learning can only be achieved with the use of handheld devices such as smart phones, PDAs, and others equivalent phones. East Africa countries, including Zanzibar is among Sub-Sahara countries whereas the citizens are living with less than one US dollar a day as pointed out by Aker and Mbiti [12]. Thus parents do not have enough money to buy expensive handheld devices for their children, so the government and other support partners should help the students to afford such kind of phones. For instance, the initiative shown by MOleNET in UK should be taken to the East Africa and/or developing countries government and other development (support) partners to support mobile learning. The MoLeNET project invested over £12 million for purchasing mobile devices of students, involving approximately 20,000 learners and 4000 staff in 115 colleges and 29 schools [19]. A huge range of mobile phone devices are facing support difficult: According to Samuels [6] it was difficult to resize the image to fit the small screen space of the mobile devices. This is caused by the technology which is required to make the image to be auto fit to handheld device. In fact, this is a big challenge for the developing countries like Zanzibar, whereby the universities don’t have mobile web applications in place. Nevertheless, their existing web based applications was not designed to be compatibility with hand handle devices. Students with their mobile phones need to scroll around into small screen. For a large company like Google, their website is flexible enough to auto-fit the
mobile phone devices. Thus users will fill more comfortable to use the website without scrolling around the screen. Poor physical infrastructure and band width which leads to slow connectivity: Bandwidth is very important aspect to the university. The university depends more on internet not only for the students to read and learning with their laptop and handheld devices but also for their internal and external communications. Poor physical infrastructure contained to be challenges to majority of developing countries. HLS are facing with law internet bandwidth and connectivity. Currently, SUZA is connected with 2mbps, and ZU is connected with 3mbps both from Zantel internet service provider. UCEZ is connected with 2mbps from Zanlink internet service provider. The internet services are not stable and make difficult for students to be connected to the internet. Moreover, the Universities are not dedicating certain amount of bandwidth to be used for students; as a result the internet service becomes unreliable and unavailable in the most of the time. Due to increasing of computing and mobile technology with the increasing number of student’s enrolment in each year, the universities should have enough bandwidth for both students and staff members. For the experience with other country like Kenya who also suffering with poor physical infrastructure. Kenya has developed lively and energetic mobile phone networks. Whereby in-service teacher training were using mobile phone for sending bulk SMS massage to each other. This system also can be used in peer-to-peer, in local decentralized groups and is socially inclusive [16]. Mobile Device Variation: Technological developments have brought about different features of mobile phones such as different screen sizes and keypads as identified by Nielsen [20]. This variation is one among challenges that are observed in our findings facing the initiative of mobile learning in HLS. VI.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Due to the fact that, students and parents cannot afford to buy PDAs and Smart phones and others equivalent devices, the government should have a long term strategy to improve life standard of their people to make them able to buy that hand handled devices which enable students in their studies. On the other hand, internal and external stakeholders need to be convinced to help developing world’s students to their study. The universities should put more emphasis on the mobile web applications so that their web based system should support mobile learning. For the particular universities such as SUZA and ZU who are teaching courses like computing, mobile technology and mobile web application development should be given top priority in their curricula. Whereas it will enable students to develop mobile web applications in order to support other learning institutions within counties. Since the bandwidth demands for the university always is increasing due to the growth of the universities in terms of enrolment of the student and technology adoption, the
universities bandwidth should be further improved. Each university should have at least 20gbps with dedicated 10 mbps for students. This will facilitates students learning and their performance to be further improved. We recommend that the government and other stakeholders to support the availability of mobile devices to students helping them in their studies. VII.
CONCLUSION
Currently, mobile learning system has not been established in any HLI in Zanzibar. The findings of this paper show that, there are many opportunities and demands for the use of this technology among HLS in the developing countries such as Zanzibar. On the other hand, the paper also outlines a number of challenges pertaining to the establishment and usage of mobile phones in learning. Finally, the paper addressed the recommendations to overcome the challenges of adopting mobile learning to HLS. It is clear that rapid changes of technology may overcome the addressed challenges in this paper. Therefore, in the future research can be conducted to recognize new challenges at that time whist for example the deployment of fiber optic may solve the existing bandwidth problem. REFERENCES [1] Pisey, S et al, (2012) “Mobile learning explores the challenges and opportunities of distance education”, In Proceeding of National Conference on Emerging Trends in Computer Technology (NCETCT-2012), 21, April, 2012, India, available at: www.worldjournalofscience.com , (Accessed August 15, 2012). [2] Prensky, M,. (2004) “What can you learn from a cell phone? Almost anything! Language Learning & Technology”, Vol. 9, no.1, pp 17-22. [3] Kress, G and Pachler, N (2007) ‘Thinking about the ‘m’ in mlearning. In N. Pachler, (Ed) Mobile learning: towards a research agenda ’, London: Institute of Education. [4] Chinery, G. (2006) “EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES Going to the MALL: Mobile Assisted Language Learning”, Language Learning and Technology, Vol. 10, no. 1, pp 9-16. [5] Thornton, P and Houser, C. (2004) “Using Mobile Phone in Education”, in proceeding of the the 2nd IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education (WMTE’04). [6] Samuels, J. (2005) “Wireless and Handheld Devices for Language Learning”, paper presented at 19th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning, the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System, available at: http://www.uwex.edu/disted/conference/ (Accessed September 15, 2012) [7] Roschelle, J. (2003) ‘Unlocking the learning value of wireless mobile devices’, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, Vol. 19, September, pp. 260-272. [8] Vavoula, GN and Sharples, M (2002). “KLeOS: A personal, mobile, knowledge and learning organisation system”, in Milrad, Hoppe,M. U and Kinshuk (ed.), Proceedings of the IEEE International Workshop on Mobile and Wireless Technologies Education (WMTE2002), August 29-30, Vaxjo, Sweeden, pp. 152156.
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