The Attitude of Nursing Students Towards Mobile Learning

Abstract

Purpose: This study was conducted to determine the attitudes of nursing students towards mobile learning. Method: This descriptive study was conducted with 369 students studying at the nursing department of a university who voluntarily accepted to participate in the study. Personal Information Form and “Attitude Scale Towards Mobile Learning” were used to collect the data. Ethics committee permission, institution permit and students informed consents were obtained for the implementation of the research. Data was analyzed in IBMM SPSS Statistics 22 program. In data analysis, percentage, frequency, and Independent Sample t-test, Kruskal-Wallis H, One-Way ANOVA, and Mann-Whitney U Tests were used. Results: All students used cellphone/smartphone. More than half of them (64.0%) thought mobile learning was useful for both theoretical and practical lessons. Most of the students (88.6%) were found to use mobile devices for research purpose. Attitudes of the students towards mobile learning were determined at the moderately positive level (Total score:160.15±23.79). It was found that those who think that mobile learning is not useful in their lessons have a statistically significant lower total score and the satisfaction sub-dimension score than others (p: 0.000; p: 0.000). Conclusions and Suggestions: Students’ widely usage of mobile devices especially smartphones, their enthusiasm to benefit from them and positive attitudes towards mobile learnings indicate mobile devices can be used in nursing education. In this context, it is recommended that related research about mobile device usage in nursing education must be increased and studies which research students’ experiences in this field must be conducted.