The results of our IMT student survey 2013 are in. We asked about student ownership of, habits with and attitudes towards mobile devices, and about their use of social media in a teaching and learning context.

Ownership of mobile devices amongst students at the LSE is very high – and practically all devices are used in some way to support their learning on campus, from accessing materials and writing notes and assignments on tablets and laptops, to using smartphones for communication and finding rooms or other campus information. We were keen to know if they would mind teachers asking them to use their devices in lectures, e.g. to participate in live online polls and about two thirds said that they would be fine with it (more than a third agreed to using mobiles and tablets). On average, students describe wifi provision good to fair, complaining mostly about frequent drops in connection.

On the social media side, LSE students are fairly strong users of social media, and use them in their learning for communication and collaboration, and to create and share files and documents.  The most frequently used one was, unsurprisingly, facebook, but the most frequently used ones in a learning context were document creation tools such as google docs and dropbox. We asked if students would mind using facebook with students and teachers, and while 62% said they would mind with teachers, only 23% said they’d mind using it with fellow students. One main reason for this is that they do not want to mix the personal with the professional, and another that students quite strongly believe that social media are not conducive to supporting learning.

We will be analysing these results further to see what implications they have for future projects in CLT, i.e. for Learning Technology and Innovation in particular and IMT in general.

A full report of the survey results can be accessed on LSE Research online http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/51652/.