Developing and Applying Smartphone Apps in Online Courses

1. INTRODUCTION A recent survey conducted by Ball State University (2014) shows that 73% of college students now have their own smartphones. The Educause Center for Applied Research survey (ECAR, 2010) on mobile phones in higher education states that 67% of surveyed students believe mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, and cell phones are vital to their success in university, and it is important to use mobile devices for academic activities. The increased ubiquity of mobile devices has offered great potential opportunities to develop new applications for online education as an instructional strategy (Gikas & Grant, 2013). Mobile applications can be created to help students access online course content, interact with instructors, and communicate with peer students (Cavus & Ibrahim, 2009; Nihalani & Mayrath, 2010). Special design of user interface are often done to facilitate the access of mobile devices and to better improve communication in teaching (Rodriguez, 2011). A common element of learning and teaching in a conventional classroom is the communicative interactions between student-student and student-instructor (Picciano, 2002). For example, students ask questions and share comments with other students and instructors. Instructors question students and adjust examples according to student's response which gives an indication about how much the student understands the content. As these interactions are fundamental learning activities, online courses need to be designed to support these interactions (mainly student-student and student-instructor communication). Nowadays many online courses offer students the opportunity to interact with each other through discussion boards, email lists, or chat rooms. Interactions in online courses have been considered critical to the success of online courses (Picciano, 2002; Richardson & Swan, 2003; He, 2013). Many online learners often report "feeling disconnected, and experience an isolation or social exclusion that impacts on their levels of participation, satisfaction and learning" (McDonald, Noakes, Stuckey, & Nyrop, 2005). Social learning theory (Vygotsky 1978, Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder 2002) suggest that learning needs to take place in social interaction and social contexts. The effectiveness and motivation of constructing knowledge in online courses could be harmed by the lack of interaction between students and students and between students and instructors (Abdous, He & Yen, 2012). Successful and smooth student-student interaction and student-instructor interaction can greatly help students develop understanding, encourage responsibility of learning, and share learning experience with each other (Vrasidas & McIsaac, 1999). As a result, the collaboration and sharing of learning experience will further motivate students' enjoyment and involvement in online courses (He, 2011). On the other hand, mobile devices are relatively new and constantly evolving technologies. Currently, most studies of mobile learning focus on effectiveness and mobile learning system design and use surveys and experiments as the main research methods (Wu et al., 2012). For example, Cheon, Lee, Crooks, & Song (2012) used surveys to discover student's intention of adopting mobile devices in learning. However, there is little research into 1) the design and implementation of mobile applications to improve communication between student-to-student and student-to-instructor in online courses; 2) the design and delivery of online courses by incorporating mobile device access. The purpose of our research was to explore: 1) how to design and implement mobile application to improve higher online teaching and learning; 2) how to revise an existing online course to incorporate the mobile application into online courses to most effectively exploit the flexibility and availability that mobile devices provide. The reality is that most online courses are designed based on desktop or laptop computers and are not very accessible to mobile devices. …