As more and more school districts, colleges, and
universities turn to mobile devices to enhance learning, understanding how students
use those devices becomes important. Purdue University conducted as survey in
the fall of 2011 to find out which gadgets its students were using and if they
had a preference between device-neutral web applications or “native” apps built
for a specific platform.
Student Preferences of Mobile App Usage,
by Kyle Bowen, director of informatics, and Matthew D. Pistilli, research
scientist for information technology at Purdue, didn’t try to settle the debate
on which mobile category was best, but rather tried to determine what was being
used and on what type of device.
The report, recently released by Educause, found that
83% of the 1,566 responding students owned Android phones or iPhones and that
the same percentage felt they had intermediate or advanced skills in using
their preferred gadget. The study found a significant number of students spent
more time using native apps to access course-related tasks and viewed the apps
as faster and easier to use, but added that those numbers may have more to do
with the marketing of apps.
“It is clear that students who own smartphones have
owned them for some time—the vast majority for a year or more,” the researchers
wrote. “Further, they spend hours each day consuming everything that smartphones
have to offer. This level of usage presents a great opportunity for
institutions to deliver new services and technologies—not by creating a new
destination but by claiming a virtual footprint in a place where students are
already spending considerable time.”
