Re-imagining Technology Enhanced Learning by Michael Flavin

Author:Michael Flavin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030557850
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)

Students pay tuition fees in many countries. They buy expensive textbooks and they also buy tablets, computers and smartphones. However, the latter are more complex than text books because they integrate students’ learning and social lives, and their lives as consumers. Moreover, students’ IT contracts and service user agreements are no longer solely with universities. They are with large IT organisations, to whom students pay fees, separate to fees for their tuition. The money they pay gives them access to goods and services unrelated to their studies.

The practice of BYOD (which dates from 2007, according to Walton (2014)) is not simply a transfer of costs from the university to the individual. It disrupts practice but is also potentially disruptive of the relationship between a university and its students. As a technological practice it offers affordable, convenient and easy to use technologies. Its cost, ease of use and convenience identify it as a disruptive innovation. The university charges for tuition in monetised systems, and the practice of BYOD means it is in a position to provide less and less hardware, effecting an efficiency innovation for its own benefit. The university, through issuing certificates of attainment, provides its imprimatur and links the student with its brand, but both the cost of tuition and the costs of hardware for learning are moved away from the institution and towards the individual, who is monetised whether they want to be or not, requiring the university to legitimise and endorse their achievements.

A student does not have to buy a smartphone or tablet. They can use their university’s IT facilities. To do so, however, determines where they can be at any one time. Hardware at universities assumes students undertake academic tasks for designated periods of time in designated spaces. Furthermore, static computers are unusable when universities are closed. It is difficult to sustain the assumption that students will undertake their work in an IT lab when many of them are in paid employment as well as studying, and when they possess devices of comparable or superior quality to those made available by their universities. In addition, while desktop computers are bulky apparatuses, necessitating students making a journey to a campus, many students own or rent devices which can be stored in a bag or a pocket. However, students may prefer not to bring user-owned technologies to university for a range of reasons, including personal security, an anxiety which can be offset by having secure storage facilities on campus. More subtle barriers to BYOD may be present, too, such as a consciousness of others’ devices and their technical superiority or perceived brand superiority.

BYOD offers students ease of use and convenience in line with Christensen’s original definition of Disruption (Christensen, 1997, p. xv). Hung (2017) found students appreciated using clickers to participate in class content but their preference was for clicker apps they could download onto their own devices, rather than clickers as a stand-alone piece of apparatus, the students citing convenience and ease of use as reasons for their views.

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