Measuring the (perceived and effective) use of mobile applications by students in higher education classes : A pilot study

This paper was developed within the scope of a PhD thesis that pretends to characterize the use of mobile applications by University of Aveiro students during class time. The main purpose of this paper is to detail the processes used in an initial pilot study that aimed to fine-tune data collection methods in order to gather data that reflected the practices of the use of mobile applications by students in a higher education institution during classes. In this study we detail all the decisions and procedures carried out to gather mobile applications usage data logs from students of a Multimedia Laboratory course belonging to an undergraduate degree on Communication Technologies. The preliminary findings suggest that the use of apps during theoretical classes of the Department of Communication and Art is quite high and the procedures to develop this kind of studies should be very carefully planned, with deeper thought of categorization of data logs, so that the research can be more valid from a scientific and academic point of view..