Technological Preferences, Levels of Utilization and Attitude of Students Towards Mobile Learning Technologies in Chartered Universities, Kenya

Abstract

The affordances of mobile technologies are being felt in many sectors of world’s economy including university education. By solving the limitations of fixed instructional technologies, mobile technologies have received ready acceptance in the education place. The purpose of the study was to investigate the student technological preferences, their levels of utilization as well as attitudes toward mobile technologies. The target population was 30,752 third year undergraduate students in Kenyan Universities. The participants (n = 375) were selected by systematic random sampling. They provided data using self-fill questionnaires. Results indicated that the smartphone was the most popular mobile device; Tecno was the most preferred handset brand; and Android was the most popular operating system. Safaricom was the dominant service provider amongst the student population. Regarding the levels of utilization of mobile technologies by students, it was concluded that though students use their mobile devices sufficiently, the use of the devices for accessing teaching and learning content was considerably low. On the attitude of students towards mobile technologies, it was observed that a sizeable number of students preferred to use the technologies over other existing instructional technologies. The findings of this study will be useful to instructional technologists, education policy makers, mobile handset manufacturers, mobile service providers and university managers as they partner to roll out digital learning infrastructure for Kenyan tertiary education.