Catherine Nickerson
College of Business, Zayed University
catherine.nickerson@zu.ac.ae 

Valerie Priscilla Goby
College of Business, Zayed University
valeriepriscilla.goby@zu.ac.ae 

Chrysi Rapanta
Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
crapanta@fcsh.unl.pt 

In the UAE, the use of Information and Communication technologies (ICT) in education and elsewhere is continuously growing. Although recent studies have shown that cultural context and attitudes to mobile learning have a significant impact on mobile learning adoption (Arpaci, 2015; Sad & Goktas, 2013), contextualizing such initiatives within higher education curricula and assessing their impact on learning is a complex area. In our study, our aim is to explore the influence of a mobile learning intervention on the learning outcomes of our students in terms of their acquisition of the conceptual knowledge and skills related to one aspect of their academic discipline, namely business communication. The objective of our study was to investigate the effect of mobile learning on the performance of our students in comparison to a conventional form of teaching intervention. Specifically, we wanted to find an answer to the following research questions:

• Does mobile learning lead to an increase in student performance?
• How does teaching that incorporates mobile learning compare to conventional teaching in terms of student performance?

The participants in our study were all business majors at ZU. There was a total of 132 students divided into six sections, who were taught by three different faculty members (Instructors A, B and C), with each faculty member teaching the same lesson material to two sections. Instructor A’s students received no specific teaching intervention on two important areas of focus in the business communication curriculum (dealing with sensitive communication and intercultural communication) other than that contained within their regular syllabus; they could therefore be considered as a control group. Instructor B’s students received a conventional teaching intervention that was specifically related to the two areas of focus in addition to the regular syllabus. Instructor C’s students received a mobile learning-based teaching intervention in both areas in addition to the regular syllabus. All students were tested at the beginning of the 16-week semester, in January 2015, and again at the end of the semester, in May 2015, using two multiple-choice tests. The first test comprised 20 questions formulated to test their knowledge of business communication concepts, and the second included ten questions designed to test their comprehension of business communication. Our findings indicate that student performance is positively influenced regardless of the type of teaching intervention that takes place, as long as that intervention is specifically targeted at one or more areas of specific knowledge or skills development. In addition, although there was no difference between a conventional or mobile learning approach in terms of an improvement in our students’ acquisition of conceptual knowledge, we did find that our mobile learning students were more likely to improve their performance than the students in our control group who had not received any specific intervention. Likewise, when we looked at our students’ performance in developing their comprehension skills, we found a greater improvement among the mobile learning student groups than among the control group students than we did between our conventional group students and our control group students. In short, while a relevant teaching intervention of any kind seems to influence student performance, when comparing traditional approaches to mobile learning it also seems plausible that a mobile learning intervention in particular will have more of an influence, especially when students are asked to demonstrate that they can apply their relevant disciplinary knowledge.
References

Arpaci, I. (2015). A comparative study of the effects of cultural differences on the adoption of mobile learning. British Journal of Educational Technology, 46, 699–712. doi: 10.1111/bjet.12160

Sad, S. N., & Göktaş, Ö. (2014). Preservice teachers' perceptions about using mobile phones and laptops in education as mobile learning tools. British Journal of Educational Technology, 45, 606–618. doi: 10.1111/bjet.12064

Catherine Nickerson is a Professor in the College of Business at Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates. She is interested in the use of mobile technologies in the classroom and the development of appropriate methods of assessment for business communication.

Valerie Priscilla Goby is a Professor in the College of Business at Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates. She has published widely in the fields of communication, IT and education.

Chrysi Rapanta is a post-doctoral researcher at the ArgLag of Institute of Philosophy at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (IFILNOVA). Her research interests lie between the areas of education, communication, argumentation, and the use of technologies for teaching and learning.