HIGHER EDUCATION TEACHERS MEET MOBILE TECHNOLOGY: APPLICATION AND ACCEPTANCE

Mobile and wearable, cloud-based user-centric devices are increasingly used in fields of sports, activity tracking and well-being. Our project brings this technology as a task supporting tool into higher education, to make use of sensor measuring possibilities and to support the teacher with that extra information. We want to support teachers in their teaching process with technology that fits their needs. We focus on task design and distribution since it is one of the most common overlapping point in many teaching approaches. The concept and prototype was mainly developed around the use case scenario of outdoor education (skiing and snowboarding) in Norway. The context and circumstances for technology in teaching is a lot different in Uganda than it is in Norway where most of our user involvement and testing is done. We already involved teachers from Uganda for a previous user testing step, challenging the requirements we gathered and gaining new insights. We brought that updated concept to Ugandan teachers to find possibilities for use in their sport teaching environment and to find out about additional challenges and attitudes towards wearable and sensor technology for teaching. We especially wanted to know which use cases they see and how their user needs and requirements are different as well as how tasks would need to be shaped in contrast to what we know from the skiing and snowboarding examples.

We used a scenario-based interview style with a focus group of 6 teachers in Uganda. In addition, a background survey was conducted as well as written notes during the interview were added to the analysis. The video recorded focus group was analysed using content analysis. The model we used to code the transcribed recordings consists of three main observation foci. The concept we use in our prototype requires to make dynamic tasks that have a trigger (based on measured sensor data), they require the content of the task and task feedback, which can consist of sensor feedback as well.

Overall, possible use cases were found and teachers expressed a very positive attitude towards mobile and wearable technology, even though many challenges and possible issues were mentioned. Possible use cases were in the direction of teaching running, aerobics, swimming, basketball, volleyball, health, fitness, and nutrition. Most teachers expressed their ideas about which tasks could be used in combination what they want to see from the sensors, where the concept of task triggering did not get as much attention. Many use cases derive from the challenges that come with huge classes and that students have to train without the teacher being present. Technical challenges, like internet coverage, temperatures and the need for water proof equipment (swimming), were mentioned.