Understanding the concerns of teachers about leveraging mobile technology to facilitate outdoor social inquiry learning: the EduVenture experience

ABSTRACT

Our work is within the context of the ubiquitous discussion about adopting mobile devices to offer school-age students new learner-centric learning opportunities. Leveraging location-based context-aware mobile technology, based on the theoretical foundation of constructivist learning, we have developed EduVenture, an integrated mobile learning system by which teachers can facilitate students pursuing outdoor social inquiry learning in social and humanities education (namely, Liberal Studies in Hong Kong). This paper reports on our study in which we investigated 302 in-service Liberal Studies teachers’ concerns about adopting EduVenture in practice with the Stages of Concern model, in terms of five categorical concerns – Evaluation, Information, Management, Consequence, and Refocusing. Results reveal that their Management concern was the most intense. The findings not only offer us critical insights into formulating more articulated interventions for better supporting teachers’ adoption of EduVenture in schools, but they also provide a useful reference for researchers and practitioners who are pursuing work on integrating mobile learning into school education.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobile learning
• context-aware technology
• outdoor learning
• teachers’ concerns
• teacher professional training

Acknowledgements

We very much appreciate the scholarly, curricular, and technical advice provided by Prof. Esther Ho, Dr Tom Chan, Mr Eric Luk, and Mr Alex Wang from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Dr Vincent Tam from The University of Hong Kong, as well as Prof. Leo Hue from The Hong Kong Institute of Education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Morris Siu-yung Jong is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, as well as the Director of the Centre for the Advancement of Information Technology in Education, at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. His research interests include online game-based learning, gamification of learning, mobile inquiry learning, and teacher professional development on technology-enhanced pedagogies. Further information about Dr Jong can be found online at: http://www.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/cri/staff/mjong.html.

Chin-Chung Tsai is a Chair Professor at the Graduate Institute of Digital Learning and Education, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taiwan. Since July 2009, he has been appointed as the Co-Editor of Computers & Education (ranked as the eighth among more than 200 educational journals indexed in SSCI by 2014 impact factor values). His research interests deal largely with constructivism, epistemological beliefs, and technology-based instruction related to science education. Further information about Dr Tsai can be found online at: http://www.cctsai.net/eng/curriculum_vita.html.

Notes

1 “EV” is the abbreviation of EduVenture.

2 There are a total of six curricular areas in the Liberal Studies curriculum; under each area, there are two or three thematic modules. For example, “Quality of Life,” “Rule of Law and Socio-political Participations,” and “Identity” are the three thematic modules under the curricular area of “Hong Kong Today.”

3 Around 80% of our 137.3-hectare campus is covered with vegetation, having 192 species of trees. As a home to over a third of all tree species in the territory, the campus is an epitome of Hong Kong's green life.

4 We invited two Liberal Studies educators from another local university to scrutinize the alignment of the content and context of this LOCALE with the thematic module concerned. After that, we further invited two government curriculum officers to validate the quality of this LOCALE.

5 Hong Kong secondary schools are divided into three academic bandings in accordance with their students’ academic achievement: Band-1 (the top), Band-2 (the middle), and Band-3 (the bottom).

6 Students are encouraged to bring their own personal devices, especially smartphones and tablets, to support mobile learning at school.

7 These dangers may be commonly known before, or observed by teachers when they are conducting the pre-trip inspection.

8 Three were developed for the previous study (Jong et al., 2015), and one was developed for the present study. They are respectively for teaching four different curricular modules. All these LOCALEs were scrutinized and validated by two Liberal Studies educators and two government curriculum officers.

Additional information

Funding

This work was substantially supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong Special Administration Region, China [Project No.: 14616815].