Nursing, Midwifery and Paramedicine Students’ Use of the Cell-Phone in Academic Learning at Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences
Author(s): Zahra Soltanian, Siam Torkizade, Nasrin Davari Dolatabadi
Abstract
Information and Communication tools play a certain role in almost all societies and are used by all social classes especially university students on a daily basis. Cell-phone is considered as a primary communicative mean in educational domain and is associated with such benefits as an effective interaction with learners as well as professors and high accessibility to enhance electronic learning among university students. Therefore, the present research aimed to explore the extent to which university students used their cell-phones to learn the academic stuff at the Nursing, Midwifery and Paramedicine faculty of Bandar Abbas University. As a descriptive/analytical study, the present research was conducted on 282 students who entered the university in 2015 and were selected randomly. The data collection instrument was a questionnaire whose reliability and validity were already established. The data were statistically analyzed via SPSS ver20.0. The most common age group ranged between 21 and 23 years (37.9%) and the least common was above 26 years (7.1%). About 45.4% of the subjects used the cell-phone in learning their academic materials while 47.9% believed that it helped to save time and facilitate learning. Moreover, a significant correlation was found between the use of cell-phone and saving time. Considering the fact that using a cell-phone facilitated learning and was also used as a portable technology it showed to facilitate the revision of materials and the time spent. Therefore, those in charge at universities are advised to consider the instructional capabilities of this tool to enhance the quality of education.
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