2013

2013 Fourth
Fourth International
International Conference
Conference on
on e-Learning
e-Learning "Best
Best Practices
Practices in
in Management,
Management, Design
Design and
and Development
Development of
of
e-Courses:
e-Courses: Standards
Standards of
of Excellence
Excellence and
and Creativity"
Creativity

Students’ Perspectives in Adopting Mobile learning at University of Bahrain

Mayyadah F. Al-Ani Sarab M. Hameed, Leka’a Faisal

Computer Science Department College of Science, University of Baghdad
Information Technology College, University of Bahrain Baghdad, Iraq
Bahrain sarab_majeed@scbaghdad.edu.iq,
mfaisal@uob.edu.bh lekaafaisal@scbaghdad.edu.iq

Abstract— Mobile devices today are everywhere with
reasonable prices. This technology can be utilized to support
learning anywhere and at anytime. Mobile learning (m-
learning) has been widely adopted in education nowadays. A
Survey among 107 students from Information Technology (IT)
College at University of Bahrain (UOB) in Kingdom of
Bahrain was conducted to find out students’ perceptions about
m-learning adoption at UOB. The survey was conducted based
on three main factors, perceived ease of use, perceived
usefulness, and facilitating conditions which are significantly
impact the students’ intention to adopt m-learning. The results
obtained from this study showed that there were positive
correlation among the three main factors in adopting m-
learning.
educational environments. Students and instructors can
access the Internet in the campus where wireless access
points are located. In order to utilize this facility and lead
UOB to the proper direction in implementing m-learning, a
questionnaire was conducted online to the targeted sample
of students regarding this point of view which is an
important step toward this new technology.
In this study, shifting from e-learning to m-learning was
introduced in section II and the methodology used and data
collection were presented in sections III and IV,
respectively. Finally, the results obtained were analyzed and
discussed in section V .

Keywords—m-learning;e-learning; percived usefulness; II. SHIFTING FROM E-LEARNING TO M-LEARNING

percified easy of use; facilitating conditions Decreasing in the cost of mobile devices and adaptation
of the people to the mobile environments leads to shift from
I. INTRODUCTION using desktop to mobile devices. This shifting changes the
behavior of people teaching, learning, accessing information
Today’s students grow up with mobile technology. They
and interacting with each other. Figure 1 shows the shifting
have spent most of their time using mobile devices like
from e-learning to m-learning [5].
Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), laptops, and smart
phones. These students are called Digital Natives. Digital Shifting from e-learning to m-learning as noted in [6] has
Natives as defined in [1] ““native speakers” of the digital been accompanied by many changes. From the pedagogical
language of computers, video games and the Internet”. perspective, e-learning is text- and graphics-based
instructions, while m-learning is more voice-, graphics-, and
According to the 2011 Horizon report, by 2015, 80
animation-based instructions. Where e-learning occurs in
percent of the people will be accessing the Internet using
classroom, laboratory or at home, m-learning can be
mobile devices. This increasing in the capabilities of mobile
occurred at any time and at any location where the mobile
devices make shifting of delivering education from desktop
device is fully functional.
to mobile devices. This new delivering of education is called
mobile learning (m-learning). M-learning has been defined While from the communication perspective, the
as “e-learning using mobile devices and wireless communication between instructor to student in e-learning is
transmission” [2][3]. Jin, Q has listed three advantages of m-
learning to students [4]. First, there is no learning restriction
in terms of physical space or time. At any place or time,
students can easily access learning materials. Instructors can
conduct lessons outside of the classroom into the students’
environments. This lead the learning to be more contextual,
and personal, rather than hierarchical and lecture-recited.
Second, the availability of wireless devices and the services
provided by mobile devices allows m-learning to be easily
merge with the learners’ lives. Third, the cost of mobile
devices are continuously decrease, make them more
affordable to public. This gives people the opportunity to
have access to m-learning.
As known that UOB is one of pioneer institutions in
Bahrain that cope with new technologies to improve the Fig. 1. Environment of (a) Today (b) Tomorrow

978-0-7695-5036-7/13 $26.00 © 2013 IEEE 86

DOI 10.1109/ECONF.2013.59
10.1109/ECONF.2013.50
time-delayed e-mail and passive communication (scheduled)
while with m-learning, instant delivery and check of email
and instance communication(spontaneous).
Whereas in e-learning student to student communication
is restricted by the location. Travel time is the main
restriction to reach the Internet site and in addition to poor
communication due to public respect. In the contrast, in the
m-learning there is no geographic boundaries in the
communication between students and no time consuming to
travel to access the Internet site. Also, it provides the
students with rich voice communication due to reduced
inhibitions in open field.
M-learning research relative to other fields of study like
e-learning can be considered in its infancy [7]. Many
research conducted in different countries introduced the
students' attitudes and perceptions towards adapting m-
learning.
Motlik [8] research about mobile learning in developing
nations was done on graduate students at King Mongkut’s
Institute of Technology, North Bangkok. In this research an
experiment was applied by displaying quiz questions on a
projector screen and the students used their mobile phones
to answer the quiz by sending a short message service (SMS)
messages to a given telephone number. The scores of the
students were the same as those of the traditional test takers.
Al-Fahad studied the attitude and perception of 186
female students from King Saud University to the use of
mobile technology in education [9]. The result obtained
from the study indicated that offering mobile learning could
be the method for improving retention of the students, by
enhancing their teaching/learning.
III. METHODOLOGY
Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) that proposed in
[10] was selected to be used in this study. TAM is an
excellent reputation in terms of robustness and explanatory
power [11]. TAM has been widely used to examine the
perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use as correlated
with people's intention to use a system or technology [10].
Perceived usefulness (PU) defined as “the degree to which a
person believes that using a particular system would be free
of effort” and perceived ease of use (PEOU) as “the degree
to which a person believes that using a particular system
would enhance his or her job performance” [10]. In some
recent studies PEOU and PU have been demonstrated to
have an impact on intention to adopt m-learning [12].
In addition to PU and PEOS, The third factor used in this
research was based on the importance of facilitating
conditions (FC). Facilitating conditions defined as “the
degree to which an individual believes that an organizational
and technical infrastructure exists to support use of the
system” [13]. Some of the technical challenges that make
adaptation of the present e-learning services to m-learning
difficult are pointed out in [14][15].
87
Based on TAM and facilitating conditions the following
hypothesis were tested:
H1: PU positively relates to PEOU of adopting m-
learning.
H2: PU positively relates to FC of adopting m-learning.
H3: PEOU positively relates to FC of adopting m-
learning..
IV. DATA COLLECTION
The target in this study was the IT students who have the
skills of using mobile technology. The survey was conducted
on IT college students enrolled in the second semester of the
academic year 2012/2013 and the tool created using Google
Forms, a type of Google application. A structured
questionnaire was created and published online to the IT
college students. The questionnaire was divided into two
main parts: demographic information of the participants and
responses to PU, PEOU and FC. Demographic information
includes six items (gender, major, completed credits,
mobile capabilities, Internet subscriber, and Internet plan).
While PU consisted of five items (adapted from [13]), which
constraint on increases in productivity and effectiveness.
PEOU consisted of five items (adapted from [13]) and
enquired about ease of access and learning. FC measured
using four items (adapted from [16]), mainly focusing on
hardware and software support and Internet speed.
Five-point likert-scales ranging from strongly disagree
(1) to strongly agree (5) measured PU, PEOU, and FC
factors. The questionnaire was filled online by 107 students
out of 1350 students enrolled in the second semester of the
academic year 2012/20123 to the IT college at UOB. As all
questions were set as required questions, this guaranteed the
accuracy, completeness and usefulness of data retrieved for
analysis.
V. QUESTIONNAIRE RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version
20.0 used for carrying out the statistical analysis from the
retrieved questionnaire. Table I shows the percentage of the
results obtained from retrieved demographic information of
the respondents.
Students from the three departments Computer
Engineering, Computer Science and Information System
from IT college responded to the questionnaire. Fortunately,
the respondents were from different levels which provided
the study the completeness.
Large screen display, high memory capacity, Internet
browsing, user interface usability, and high battery life of
mobile devices are constraints that affected on the success
of m-learning [14]. From the collected data we found that
26.17% of the respondents own mobile devices which have
all the above features. While only 2 out of 107 respondents
did not have these mobile features in their mobile devices.
 TABLE I. DEMOGRAPHIC INFORMATION OF RESPONDENTS TABLE III. PEARSON’S CORRELATIONS MATRIX, MEANS AND
STANDARD DEVIATIONS
Options Percent
Gender Male 40.19% PU PEOU FC
Female 59.81% Perceived Usefulness (PU) **
Major Computer Engineering 16.82% 1 0.63 0.50**
Computer Science 52.34% Perceived Ease Of Use (PEOU) 0.63** 1 0.55**
Information Systems 30.84%
Completed 0-29 credits 18.69% Facilitating Conditions (FC) 0.50** 0.55** 1
Credits 30-59 credits 20.56%
Mean 3.94 3.97 3.76
60-89 credits 31.78%
90-126 credits 28.97% Standard Deviation
Mobile Large screen display 62.62% 0.69 0.71 0.84
characteristics High memory capacity 69.16% **correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed)
Internet browsing 87.85% the variables, PU, PEOU and FC. Correlation coefficients
User interface usability 67.29%
High battery life 38.32%
range from 0.5 to 0.63 which were considered strong. In
None 1.87% addition, no correlation coefficient exceed 0.8 which means
Internet Yes 90.65% no multicollinearity problem in this study [20].
subscriber No 9.35%
Internet Plan Prepaid 60.75%
Postpaid 39.25% VI. CONCLUSION
The increasing of mobile devices’ users at UOB and the
In addition, more than 90% of respondents were Internet developing of technology and education, lead to study the
subscriber where 60.75% use prepaid plan while 39.25% perspective of UOB students from IT college for adopting
use postpaid plan. The existing of these features encourage m-learning. The result obtained showed that there was a
the students’ intuitions to adopt m-learning. Whereas, strong correlation among the factors, PU, PEOU and FC.
recently in Kingdom of Bahrain different telecommunication Understanding these factors that effecting m-learning will
companies are offering commercial packages of mobile help UOB to consider these factors in their design and
device with broad band internet connection in reasonable implementation when they adopting m-learning. It was clear
prices. from the obtained results that the students were interest in
using mobile devices in learning. However, more items
Cronbach’s Alph used to measure the internal should be added and more research is needed to highlight on
consistency of the latent variable, and acceptable values are other factors that effects on adapting m-learning at UOB.
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