To say the current generation of college students —and those to come— are technology savvy, is an understatement. They are the most connected generation of students to date spending more than four hours per day using mobile applications.
Mobile applications have the capacity to build campus connections and engage students like never before. When instructors use an effective mobile strategy, the student engagement rate increases exponentially.
Data scientists, social scientists, and behavioral designers have teamed up to create mobile platforms for academic purposes. They usually integrate academic information, class schedules, and course information. Students can have access to campus activities, other students, faculty, and staff as well as providing support when students need it. Mobile applications can also aid a variety of courses, making them more engaging and interactive.
Mobile technology may be an excellent way to support learning and respond to students' needs. Since smartphones are equipped with a variety of sensors, they can be used to collect valuable data. This is particularly useful when it comes to engaging college students in the scientific research process.
Engaging college students in quantitative research methods
Quantitative research, widely used in psychology, economics, sociology, marketing, political sciences, also in history and anthropology include various forms of surveys such as online, paper, mobile, and kiosk surveys, online polls, systematic observations, Website interceptors, longitudinal studies, telephone and face-to-face interviews.
A group of researchers created an application with the goal of engaging college students in the social sciences who are required to learn quantitative research methods and statistics.
The mobile scientific inquiry platform, called Ruzo, enables instructors and students to create research projects as custom applications, collect data on the go, and visualize the data using a Web-based interactive tool.
Ruzo was created as a prototype. However, the findings which were reported in the paper Leveraging Mobile Technology to Engage College Students in Scientific Research (PDF) showed the potential of mobile technology to engage college students in scientific inquiry. According to the researchers, a similar technique could be used to engage additional target audiences in location-based data collection such as tracking wildlife or hazards in a certain area.
More broadly, this work can serve as inspiration for the Mobile Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community to explore potential practical implications of mobile technology in academic instruction. According to the paper, the interviews conducted with experienced instructors showed that to many “it did not occur to them to integrate mobile technology into their course curriculum.”
Indeed, active learning with mobile technology fosters a positive attitude toward research. The researchers believe that Mobile HCI researchers and practitioners, who have the most comprehensive knowledge of mobile technology, should be the ones leading the effort to leverage mobile capabilities for practical purposes, in education and beyond.
They also encourage educators and designers to continue incorporating mobile technologies into existing curriculums for better scaffolding scientific inquiry.
Mobile technology for better student engagement and communication
Ready Education’s report, Overcoming the Student Communication Challenge, states that 54 percent of emails sent to students are broadly ignored, especially those sent by advisors which make up 39 percent of the total emails. One reason for this is that emails are increasingly overwhelming for everyone, including college students. By switching to mobile and applications, institutions can reach, integrate, and engage more students.
Cedar Crest College has been using a mobile application to improve student retention with a student adoption rate of 90 percent using the application. The mobile strategy also improved engagement and assessment at events.
Whatever the needs, embracing mobile technology and applications can certainly become powerful and useful tools in today’s connected campus.