Mobile learning in nursing education: Preference and readiness of nursing students

Kam-cheong Li, Linda Yin-king Lee, Suet-lai Wong, Ivy Sui-yu Yau, and Billy Tak-ming Wong
The Open University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong SAR, China

Nursing education stresses the importance of theoretical and practical integration. Teaching and learning activities occur both in the classroom and the clinical venue. Clinical learning, in particular, commonly takes place away from the classroom, outside and beyond regular school days and hours. Owing to these characteristics, nursing education has to be delivered in a flexible way and mobile learning appears to be a desirable means of doing so. In order to achieve effective learning outcomes from mobile learning, one of the essential issues is to deliver mobile learning that meets the preferences and readiness of nursing students.

This paper presents a survey which aimed to investigate the preference of nursing students for engaging in mobile learning and their readiness to adopt this learning mode. A convenience sample of 158 full-time undergraduate nursing students from The Open University of Hong Kong was recruited. Data were collected through a questionnaire which was developed according to the findings from two previously conducted focus group interviews with nursing students. The survey results revealed that nursing students mostly preferred to access their learning materials anytime and anywhere. The nursing students considered ‘ease of reading’ and ‘ease of note-taking and highlighting’ as the most important factors that determined their use of electronic learning materials. They further considered ‘level of comfort in reading’, ‘portability’, and ‘input and output capabilities’ as the three most important factors in using a mobile device for learning. Among the different study topics, they highly preferred to have body systems and diseases as well as medical terminology to be provided in multimedia materials in the mobile device. Based on these findings, the challenges and opportunities of mobile learning in nursing education are discussed. Unique features of mobile learning for nursing education are suggested.