Status Quo of Media Usage and Mobile Learning in Engineering Education

The usage of different kinds of media is part and parcel of teaching and learning processes in higher education. According to today’s possibilities of information and communication technologies, mobile devices and app-usage have become indispensable for a big share of the population in everyday life. However, there is little empirical evidence on how students use mobile devices for learning processes in higher education, especially in engineering education. Within the project “Excellent Teaching and Learning in Engineering Sciences (ELLI)”, three large technical universities (RWTH Aachen University, Ruhr-University Bochum, Technical University Dortmund) follow different approaches in order to improve the current teaching and learning situation in engineering education. Many of the corresponding measures are media-related. In this context, a broad understanding of media is applied which includes hardware as well as software. Amongst others, research is conducted on the topics of mobile learning, virtual laboratories, virtual collaboration, social media services and e-learning recommendation systems for teaching staff. In order to match the literature and results of the project with the current habits of study related media usage of students, the three universities conducted a survey in cooperation with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). The KIT’s questionnaire covers more than 50 education-related media and IT-Services and has been applied at over 20 universities in 6 countries. For the survey conducted within the ELLI project, the topic of mobile learning was added to the questionnaire. Over 1.500 students were asked about their habits of study related media usage in terms of frequency of use and level of satisfaction. Regarding the topic of mobile learning, the students were asked for the kind of hardware and the kind of apps they use for higher education purposes. The 130 identified apps were clustered regarding subject and function. This paper presents the main results concerning the students’ general habits of study related media usage and their mobile learning habits. It concludes with a special focus on the possibilities mobile devices offer to the improvement of engineering education.