Abstract
The utilization of mobile technologies for the purpose of mLearning has immense potential in education whether face to face, blended or distance. With the current high ownership rate of these devices around the world it is quite surprising that mobile devices are not utilized extensively.
This study is part of a larger study that investigated the utilization of mobile devices in a blended environment from the students’ perspective. It uses the behavioral dimension as described in the ‘Uses and Gratification Theory’ (Balakrishnan and Raj 2012) to investigate behavioral issues in the adoption of mLearning approaches at the International University of Management in Namibia, a developing country. The main target population was students enrolled in Business Information Systems. The rich data collected contain a multi-dimensional aspect and in this paper the reasons that students use mobile devices and the reward they receive upon usage is analysed. It was hoped that by identifying such reasons for use of the devices and barriers that might exist in not using them can be used as a starting point to increase the use of mLearning using mobile devices within this environment. The main objective is to ensure that mLearning becomes a lifebuoy and not a constriction.
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Eybers, S., Giannakopoulos, A. (2015). The Utilisation of Mobile Technologies in Higher Education: Lifebuoy or Constriction?. In: Brown, T., van der Merwe, H. (eds) The Mobile Learning Voyage - From Small Ripples to Massive Open Waters. mLearn 2015. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 560. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25684-9_22
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