Abstract:

Nowadays, students experience digital environments in a very tactile and personal way through a wide variety of mobile devices (i.e., smartphones and tablets) whose uses can be converted into collaborative learning practices. Smartphones are increasingly becoming ever-present, penetrating and transforming everyday social practices and space. Smartphones are no longer only a tool for communication, but in many cases have become an instrument of people’s social and work life, and possibly, a powerful instrument in academic life. Therefore, middle and higher education in developed and developing countries are now trying to adopt the use of smartphones in the learning process from different perspectives and teaching methods (UNESCO, 2013; Johnson et al., 2014). We present an analysis of academic uses from Spanish university students when using smartphones for academic purposes. The purpose is to establish which factors and uses are perceived by students as more functional and productive in order to integrate these practices and uses in the European Higher Education Area. In this study we have implemented a quantitative methodology through factor analysis techniques, in order to discover the main smartphones' academic and general uses for improving learning processes in university subjects. To this end, a scale has been developed and validated to identify academic uses based on the participation of 419 Spanish college students from six Universities. According to the results obtained, we found in factor 1 that University students consider smartphones as a useful tool for developing academic tasks, mainly: "To study", "To look for academic information", "To interchange academic stuff", and "To look for subjects’ information". Furthermore, smartphones can help students to pose and answer questions, complete collaborative projects, and, more generally, engage in the social interactions foundational to learning. Therefore, it is recommended that universities continue developing new didactic strategies to connect both formal-informal and face-to-face ubiquitous learning settings

Keywords:

Smartphones, m-learning, Generic Competencies, Higher Education.