Real-cases of classroom mLearning – BYOD for mobile student response system

Paul Lam
Kevin Wong
Tracy Tai 

The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

 

Abstract:

With continuous advancement and growing popularity of mobile technology, mobile devices may serve as an alternative learning tool in higher education. In the paper, we would like to present preliminary findings of our experience of promoting a new campus-wide web-based student response system (uReply) at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) with the assumption that students bring along and use their own devices (BYOD) to engage in rich interactions in the classroom. 

The web-based student response system has been installed in most CUHK classrooms since September 2012. The system has consistently recorded around 1000 student-visits per week during the teaching periods. Through studying the activity logs recorded in the system, as well as teacher and student surveys administered in January 2013, we would like to report findings in the following areas concerning issues such as feasibility and acceptance of real-case classroom mLearning on a BYOD basis.

i) Teachers’ acceptance of using the mobile technology in classroom,

ii) Students’ acceptance of the mobile technology in classroom,

iii) Benefits and concerns from the perspectives of teachers and students, and

iv) Insights for the future.

In brief, the preliminary findings we have tend to confirm that many teachers and students accept that mobile devices can be good teaching and learning tools in the classroom. It is very impressive for the researchers to find out that teachers are creative and are able to use the system to achieve a big range of learning benefits through asking different questions and designing different pre- and post-tasks to go with the uReply sessions. Nevertheless, there have been a few setbacks and technical limitations. These will be highly valuable information for any future work in this area to refer to.