How Do Health Sciences Students Use Their Mobile Devices in Problem-Based Learning?

Abstract

The increasing use of mobile devices among health sciences students presents both opportunities and challenges to problem-based learning (PBL) in face-to-face tutorials and during self-directed learning. The purpose of the present study was to find out how common the use of mobile devices is among students in PBL, how they are used, and whether some general recommendations can be made to help students make more effective use of mobile devices during PBL. Based on the findings of focus interviews of students and facilitators (Chan et al., 2015), the authors developed a self-administered online questionnaire to examine students’ usage of mobile devices in PBL. The students from three healthcare professional programmes in a university in Hong Kong were invited to take part in the online survey. A total of 346 students (response rate of 31.89 %) completed the online questionnaire. It was found that almost all of them (99 %) own one or more mobile devices. Most of them (98 %) used their mobile devices in PBL, usually for educational purposes, such as the search and synthesis of information and the use of specific software on these devices, especially those for the visualization of knowledge (like atlases or software for creation of concept maps). There was a small percentage of students who never used mobile devices in PBL. The reasons included the facilitators’ explicit discouragement of their use, and the desire to focus on the discussion instead of searching for information. Based on the findings of the survey, the authors arrived at four recommendations aiming at more effective use of mobile devices in PBL: students should be free to choose to use mobile devices; mobile devices should be used for educational purposes only, such as the search for factual information or multimedia files; PBL tutorial time should mostly be spent on discussion, instead of searching for information; students should be encouraged to use cloud-based services for collaborative activities such as note-making and concept mapping in PBL.