Providing Students With Mobile Access to an Assessment Platform: Lessons Learned

Abstract

The growing ubiquity, rich functionality, and relative affordability of mobile devices have been seen as opportune factors for implementing mobile learning solutions that can be used in a variety of contexts and domains. Plenty of successful mobile educational applications have been built. This paper describes an attempt to build on this success. The authors have investigated the use of mobile devices by students accessing assessment and self-assessment quizzes in the context of a university course. Two experiments were conducted with undergraduate students. The results of the first experiment were not successful, and initially, very few students used mobile devices. After several adjustments, during the second experiment, the usage of the system increased. However, the numbers were still much lower when compared to desktop access. This paper reports an investigation into the lack of mobile usage of the developed platform despite the educational affordances brought by mobile devices.