Using Smartphones in the College Classroom

Introduction

Some of the earliest research that examined the potential impact technology could have on learning outcomes and motivation to learn was done by Dr. Lorna Uden at Staffordshire University in the United Kingdom (Dai & Uden, 2008; Uden, 2007; Uden & Brandt, 2000). Using technology in the classroom was shown to increase student motivation and engagement. Smartphones represent the evolution of the mobile telephone into a mini computer that can be carried anywhere, which was quite different from simply incorporating technology into course curriculum. A recent overview of this progression (Watts, 2012) indicates that in a period of less than 10 years, individual technological hardware has been incorporated into the mobile phone, often making those original devices unnecessary (e.g., fax machine, a separate digital camera). Smartphones now include the ability to email (creating the new term ‘snail mail’ as it reduced the need to use the postal service), take photos, create videos, play music, play video games, and access webpages on the internet. The ability to accomplish all of these things in one device has made this technology a new resource that can be incorporated into the college classroom. Activities for inside the classroom and assignments to be completed outside of the classroom have been incorporated into college curriculum with varying degrees of success. An early researcher on the way mobile phones and podcasting could be used to improve learning outcomes was Dr. Dani McKinney at State University of New York – Fredonia (McKinney, Dyck & Luber, 2009). This work indicated that students could learn from podcasts just as well as when attending a live lecture, provided the students listened carefully and took notes over the material in the same way they would during the live class session.

Since this early research, a couple of key researchers have published interesting studies that indicate the best conditions for using mobile technology and smartphones in the classroom. One researcher is Dr. Susanne Voelkle at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom. Her work has focused on specific classroom exercises that can help both students and instructors make formative assessments of learning (Voelkle, 2013; Voelkle & Bennett, 2014). Another researcher that is doing cutting edge work on using smartphones in the classroom is Dr. Patient Rambe and his colleagues at the University of the Free State in South Africa (Rambe & Bere, 2013a,b; Rambe & Nel, 2013). His research focuses on using instant messaging in the classroom to increase student engagement. The purpose of this chapter is to give an overview of some current trends in incorporating this new technology into the college curriculum, and focuses mainly on the most recent research (i.e., 2011-2014) in an effort to give a more focused snapshot of the current state of this topic.