Smartphone Use among Undergraduate STEM Students during COVID-19: An Opportunity for Higher Education?

Abstract

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, students worldwide have continued their education remotely. One of the challenges of this modality is that students need access to devices such as laptops and smartphones. Among these options, smartphones are the most accessible because of their lower price. This study analyzes the usage patterns of smartphone users of undergraduate Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) students during the COVID-19 pandemic. This cross-sectional descriptive study included 365 students: 162 (44.4%) women and 203 (55.6%) men from a Chilean university. The results revealed that students often accessed the learning management system (LMS) with their computers rather than with their smartphones. Students were connected to the LMS for more hours on their computers than on their smartphones. However, they spent more hours simultaneously connected on their computers and smartphones than just on their computers. During the day, students accessed the LMS mainly from 13:00 to 1:00. The number of connections decreased from 1:00 to 8:00 and increased from 8:00 to 13:00. The LMS resource that students accessed the most using smartphones was discussion forums, while the one they accessed the least was wiki pages. We expect these results to motivate faculties to schedule their activities during the hours students tend to be online and promote discussion forums.

Smartphones and Learning: An Extension of M-Learning or a Distinct Area of Inquiry

“…Many lecturers permit the use of smartphones in the college classroom and perceive them as an important adjunct to instruction [8,9]. The COVID-19 pandemic and the rapid move to emergency remote teaching (ERT) intensified the increasing reliance on mobile learning in general [10] and smartphones in particular [11]. This included innovative approaches to the delivery of instruction that included cloud-based computing approaches that enabled greater engagement from students via the smartphone [12].…”

Factors affecting young customers’ smartphone purchase intention during Covid-19 pandemic

“…Smartphones are thus becoming an inseparable part of people's daily lives because of their powerful computational capabilities and diverse applications, such as email applications, online bill payments, online banking, online shopping and intelligent multi-modal transportation system ( Barot et al, 2014 ; Gan et al, 2016 ; Ho and Yang, 2017 ; Liang et al, 2018 ). Although use of mobile phone (via personal digital assistants or PDAs, laptops, and wireless mobile phones) in the form of mobile learning in educational fields increased in the past decade ( Zhang et al, 2014 ); but young generation is the largest segment of the smartphone users and during the Covid-19 pandemic time, the use of smartphone among young customers for educational purpose increases manifold and reaches its pick ( Mella-Norambuena et al, 2021 ; Saadeh et al, 2021 ).…”

El aprendizaje móvil (m-learning) en la universidad en tiempos de la COVID-19: Una herramienta formativa en la Educación Superior

“…Además, dicho aprendizaje mediante dispositivos móviles adopta diversas formas: se puede utilizar dispositivos portátiles para acceder a recursos educativos (Ganesan et al, 2021). Por su parte, en la literatura científica pedagógica, los fundamentos teóricos del aprendizaje móvil, sus medios, métodos y formas se consideran en detalle y se divulgan en los trabajos de investigadores nacionales y extranjeros (Chachi, 2021;López-Moranchel et al, 2021;Mella-Norambuena et al, 2021;Tejada y Barrutia, 2021). Un estudio reciente sobre un modelo de aceptación de aprendizaje móvil a partir de un cuestionario que vincula elementos pedagógicos y tecnológicos en época de pandemia (Yun-Peng et al, 2021).…”

“…Actualmente, en todas sus etapas, se produce una integración educativa paulatina de las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación (TIC); y es que en base a ellas, el uso de dispositivos móviles (tabletas, computadoras portátiles y otros dispositivos móviles) y, sobre todo, un teléfono móvil, una herramienta insustituible y multifuncional también en el día a día de cualquier habitante de nuestro país, pasa a primer plano en el proceso de aprendizaje (Qashou, 2021;Tejada y Barrutia, 2021). Todo lo anterior configura un escenario donde surgen nuevas necesidades, exigencias e intereses a causa de la COVID-19 como la sincronía ubicua, la distancia social, los protocolos de bioseguridad y la multired social (Sophonhiranrak, 2021); también el empleo del móvil para casi todas las actividades comunicativas en tiempo de pandemia (el llamado boom de las apps) (Romero-Rodríguez et al, 2021a); así también el incremento y mayor evidencialidad de la brecha digital por falta de conectividad y otros recursos (Mella-Norambuena et al, 2021;Loayza-Maturrano, 2021). Asimismo, surge la necesidad de una nueva enseñanza virtual (pizarras digitales virtuales, videotutoriales, repositorios virtuales); un distinto aprendizaje no presencial (aulas virtuales, aprendizaje sincrónica y asincrónico) (Magsayo, 2021); así como aprendizaje móvil mediado por redes sociales: el whatsapp for learning, el telegram for learning y los webinar for learning López-Moranchel, et al (2021); Sophea et al (2022);Valverde-Macias & Llerena Izquierdo (2022).…”