Using Mobile Technology in Education: Perspectives of Students and Instructors

Mobile technology has the tremendous potential in supporting and improving education and its delivery. As a new phenomenon that is gaining popularity, the values of mobile technology in education need to be better researched and understood. In this research, we used the Value-Focused Thinking approach to interview students and instructors to identify the values of education that are enabled by mobile technology. These values are represented in the form of a means-ends objective network that not only captures the values of education facilitated by mobile technology but also depicts the relationships between these values. The values of education enabled by mobile technology support all four types of learning approaches – behaviorism, cognitivism, constructivism, and social constructivism, thus facilitating the different forms of learning and providing flexibility to students on their preferred way of learning. The means-ends objective network derived from this research can serve as a conceptual foundation for future studies and provides useful guidelines to practitioners for implementation of mobile technology in education.