USE OF MOBILE PHONES TO SUPPORT COURSEWORK: EVIDENCE FROM WA POLYTECHNIC, GHANA

Abstract

The recent use of the mobile phone as a learning tool in tertiary institutions in Ghana has generated a lot of academic interest. What has even become more interesting is how the mobile phone and its usage can be adopted to respond to different educational environments as well as teaching and learning experiences. But there seems to be little research on how students of Wa Polytechnic fully explore the mobile phone technology in their coursework. This paper investigates how students of Wa Polytechnic use the mobile phone as an interactive medium to access educational content to support coursework and the challenges that confront them. The survey approach was employed for the research and a simple random sampling technique was used to select 300 respondents from a population of 1,269 students. The study revealed that 82% of the students use mobile phone to support coursework. The major challenge that faces students as they use mobile phones to support coursework is poor network service. Other relatively moderate challenges include inadequate knowledge in the use of mobile phones, faulty mobile phones, and lack of Microsoft Office applications in their mobile phones. The study recommends the introduction of Mobile Service System Design and Assembling and Repair of Mobile Phones as courses incorporating the use of mobile phones. Mobile service providers should innovatively improve network stability during school sessions for students to effectively use mobile phone to support course work.