The Opportunities and Challenges in using Mobile Phones as
learning tools for Higher Learning Students in the Developing
Countries: Zanzibar Context
Haji Ali Haji Abdalla Abu Shaame
Department of Computer Science Department of Computer Science
The State University of Zanzibar The State University of Zanzibar
Zanzibar, Tanzania Zanzibar, Tanzania
hajiali10@hotmail.com aashaame@hotmail.com
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the opportunities and
challenges of mobile learning among Higher Learning
Students (HLS) in developing countries of Zanzibar context.
In the current era of advanced technology, mobile learning
represents exciting new frontiers in education. It becomes
feasible and offers new benefits to students.
The study builds on the experiences of students from three
higher learning institutions in Zanzibar which were assumed
to be representative of others learning institutions in
developing world particularly in Africa nations which have
similar learning environments. The paper begins by reviewing
numerous cases of mobile learning which were conducted in
several countries. Data was collected through case studies and
questionnaires so as to get the students view points on their
experience of mobile learning.
It was found that students are aware of mobile technology and
they are motivated to use their phones in order to facilitate
their learning. The study observed that there are many
opportunities for students to adopt mobile learning and that it
encourages them to be self-motivated and increases their
engagement with learning behaviour. On the other hand, high
cost of mobile devices and poor bandwidth within the higher
learning institutions are among the mentioned challenges
This is the first study conducted in HLS in Zanzibar which
with the mentioned of opportunities and challenges posed use
by the mobile phones in learning within developing world. The
research findings would be of significance in assisting the
students in their studies. Consequently educators will help to
distribute teaching materials efficiently.
Key words: opportunities, challenges, mobile learning, higher
learning students
I. INTRODUCTION
The endless growth of Information and Communication
Technology (ICT) greatly simplifying the learning
environment to students, hence the growth of mobile phone
technology makes social services such as learning, news,
weather forecast and others to be easier accessible where
ever network coverage is present. Unlike traditional form of
learning, mobile learning has not so far been studied as a
phenomenon in the world. Rather it has been introduced as
a new technology-led practice that will potentially lead to
new learning phenomena and brings the benefit in teaching
and learning for students [1][2]. Due to the high availability
of mobile phones, mobile technology allows anyone to
access internet anywhere and at any time.
Omar Haji Kombo
Department of Computer Science
The State University of Zanzibar
Zanzibar, Tanzania
omarhaji22@gmail.com
In the developing world, mobile phones have become an
important tool not only in day-to-day communication but
also in education activities. Students use mobile phones for
accessing learning materials which are available in different
sources to facilitate their studies and undertaken discussion.
Students do not have to wait for access to university’s
computer to learn. They can access learning material
through their phones. Mobile phones are more popularly
available with reasonable price for university students
compared to laptops, palm tops and desk tops [3][4].
Research conducted by Thornton and Houser [5] in Japan
observed that students were willing to use their phones in
learning activities. The study found that most of the
students’ phones had different features that support mobile
learning. On the other hand, in several developing nations
including Zanzibar most of students’ phones have not
features that enabled them to easy access the learning
materials.
Furthermore, the research of Samuels [6] conducted in
Norway, which aimed to encourage communication
between students and teacher with the use of mobile
devices. The study revealed that students were free to
access the learning material at home or any other places
where network connections are available. This increased
their understanding because they were able to communicate
with instructor whenever when they got stuck. However,
there are some difficulties were identified during Samuels
study such as small screen size which caused un
compatibility of web application. Despite of these
challenges, the Samuels’s study observed that both students
and instructor were benefited with mobile learning
applications. The students were easy provided learning
materials and on time, it is also enabled instructor to
integrate teaching without enter to the classroom. Students
were abled downloading the learning materials at any time
as soon as after instructors uploaded them.
A number of researches have been carried out around the
world illustrating the opportunity of mobile phones in
learning, many of which stalk the rapid advances in ICT
and rapid penetration of internet in human activities. The
majority of these studies demonstrate that there are benefits
of use the mobile phones in learning applications. This
paper discusses the opportunities and challenges of using
mobile phones as learning tools for Higher Learning
Students (HLS) in the developing countries of Zanzibar
context.
 II. MOBILE PHONE FOR EDUCATION
Mobile learning is the use of wireless and mobile
technologies to facilitate, support, enhance and extend
learning and teaching. In the recent years wireless mobile
technology has been used to enhance teaching and learning
process in Higher Learning Institutions (HLI) in both
developed and developing countries. The learning process
is closely linked to the concept of mobility and facilitates
gathering of student’s response quickly and anonymously
[7][8].
Meanwhile, using mobile phones in HLI will expose
students to good studying environment with several
opportunities such as easy accessing learning materials,
discussions, taking assessments, peer share and supporting.
Mobile phones in learning have many important
characteristics which attract students in modern educational
perspective, including increasing portability, ubiquity,
personal ownership, social interactivity, connectivity and
personalization [9]. Furthermore, mobile technology
provides delivery of context based knowledge, eliminates
barriers of location and time to be in class rooms. The
materials can be accessed remotely and shared at any time
which in turn helps to boost the self-managed learning,
whereby students can get immediate feedback to their
questions.
Despite of many benefits of applying mobile phone in
education, there are some challenges that facing the mobile
learning in the developing countries like Zanzibar. Device
variability, slow down load speed and limited internet
access, small screen size with poor resolution, colour, and
contrast; and limited memory are among the challenges of
mobile learning in education as pointed out by Elias [10].
III. METHODOLOGY
The researchers decided to use case study and
questionnaires as the data collection techniques. According
to Kothari [11] case study may be used as a starting point
and it gives direction and structure to set of questions the
researchers asked. On the other hand, Kothari also stated
that, questionnaire is easily customizable and the manner of
its construction is easy to follow which is only very
practical in the nature of the research. Responses of a
questionnaire are objectified and standardized thus allowing
responses to be entered and tabulated easily thus is the only
way to avoid biases in our research [12][13].
The questionnaires were distributed to three Universities in
Zanzibar namely, the State University of Zanzibar (SUZA),
University College of Education Zanzibar (UCEZ) and
Zanzibar University (ZU). The questionnaire was well
organized and contained three parts. First part of
questionnaire consisted of items that asked respondents
about their demographic data. Second part was consisted of
the awareness of mobile technology and third part was
asked about awareness of use the mobile phone in learning
system. The questions were measured on different scale;
there are items measured by Yes/No and not sure scales and
others were measured by multiple attributes selection.
A sample size of 106 students was randomly selected from
those three Universities. Even though, the only 101
questionnaires were completed and collected, however five
(5) questionnaires were not collected, due to some
respondents refuse to continue and some of them were not
marked properly. Meanwhile, the percentage of collected
questionnaire is 95% compared to uncollected
questionnaire which is 5%, therefore according to Bryman
and Cramer [14] and McGiven [15] 90% of the results from
respondents are more than enough to make estimates about
the entire population.
IV. FINDINGS FROM QUESTIONNAIRE AND
CASE STUDY
The finding results from questionnaire were represented in
the form of tables in order to demonstrate the categorical
data and to illustrate descriptive values. The results of the
questionnaires were presented clearly in the tables’ format
and analysed in the following subsections.
A. Characteristics of Respondent’s Demographic Data
Table 1 shows the demographic characteristics of the
respondents. The result shows that most of the respondents
who participated in the questionnaire 63% were male
compare to the 37% of female. Furthermore the data
finding shows that 40% of respondents who answer the
questionnaires were from the SUZA, 34% from ZU and
26% of respondents were from UCEZ. It was also found
that most of respondents (51%) were Bachelor Degree
students, 36% were Diploma Students and 13% were
Certificate Students.
TABLE 1: CHARACTERISTICS OF RESPONDENT’S
DEMOGRAPHIC DATA
Variable Attribute Percentage (%)
Gender Male 63
Female 37
Learning SUZA 40
Institution
ZU 34
CU 26
Academic Bachelor Degree 51
Qualification
Diploma 36
Certificate 13
B. Awareness of Mobile Technology
Table 2 represents the results of findings towards awareness
of mobile technology in learning. The majority of
respondents (91%) found posses’ mobile phone and only
9% of respondents do not possess the mobile phone.
Furthermore, the result found that, most of the respondents
who possess mobile phone, 80% have normal cell phone,
while 11% of the respondents have Smart phone and 9% of
them own Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). In addition,
the result found that 33% of respondents were mostly use
call service (dialling) to communicate with friends and
families, 41% of the them were mostly use SMS service,
while 14% of the respondents were suffering internet and
only 12% of them were use their phone for reading and
learning activities.
 TABLE 2: AWARENESS OF MOBILE TECHNOLOGY
Variable Attribute Percentage
(%)
Belong Mobile Phone Yes 91
No 9
Not sure 0
Type of Mobile Phone Cell Phone 80
PDA 9
Smart Phone 11
Most use service in Dialling 33
mobile phone SMS 41
Browsing Internet 14
Reading e-books 12
This study is far differing from the study conducted by
Thornton and Houser [5] who found that all students (100%
of the respondents) have mobile phone and about 99% of
students reported were using mobile phone for sending
email on their mobile phone, with only 1% sending email
from PCs. In their study also found about 80% of students
reported were using PDA which is highly differing from
HLS whereby the only 9% of the respondents were using
PDA. This shows that welfare of the developed country
students are very difference to the developing countries. In
addition, the Japanese survey found that about 61% of the
respondents were using their mobile phone for web
function such as browsing and searching educational
materials, although large number (85%) were using for
charting with friends and family. This show that the
Japanese students were more successful benefited with
mobile technology compared to the majority of developing
countries’ students. It help them in their studies compared
to the HLS in the developing nations who are not use
mobile phone for learning instead they use for messaging,
dialling and other entertainment activities. However, this
could be highly contributed by the level of technology and
mobile phone accessed by these two populations.
C. Use of Mobile Phone in Learning
The results of survey obtained on the use of mobile phones
in the HLS found that, the majority of respondents 87%
were positively agreed that the use of mobile phone may
assists in their studies as shown in Table 3, while 13% of
the respondents were not sure on that service and no one
disagreed with that question. On the second side, the
researchers wanted to know how often the students use their
mobile phone in the learning activities. The results reveals
that only 9% of respondents were mostly use their phones
in learning activities, whereby the majority of respondents
(61%) never use their mobile phones in learning purposes,
and 30% of them were rare use their phones in learning
purposes. In addition, 78% of respondents agreed to the
idea of establishment of mobile learning in the high level
institutions which will help students to facilitate their
learning, 7% of them did not agree with that idea and 15%
were not sure about mobile learning system.
TABLE 3: USE OF MOBILE PHONE IN LEARNING
Variable Attribute Percentage
(%)
Mobile Phone in Yes 87
Learning
No 0
Not Sure 13
Often use of Mobile Most of the time 9
Phone in Learning
Rare 30
Never 61
Mobile Learning in Yes 78
Institution
No 7
Not Sure 15
D. Wide spreading of Mobile Phone
The findings from case study show that, the access and use
of mobile phone in education has increased dramatically
over the past decade in developing nations [16]. Case of
Nigeria, Ghana and Cote D’lvoire found that mobile
penetration has been growing at a phenomenal pace over
the past five years. The mobile subscriptions for these three
countries exceed 130 million. The report also revealed that
in West Africa, mobile internet use has grown significantly
in recent years to reach penetration levels almost equal to
fixed line use for the first time [17].
There is also rapid penetration of use mobile phone in
South Africa. The research commissioned by infoDev, a
global partnership program within the World Bank group
found half of the 50 million people in South Africa live
below poverty line, more than 75 percentage among those
in low income groups who are above 15 years own mobile
phone and more than 98.5 percentage of the country’s
population has access to telephone due to the widespread
use of cellular telephones [18]
Therefore, based on the research findings conducted in the
HLS, majority of the students are interested in adaption of
mobile learning in their studies. Hence, it is also found that
the use of mobile phones as a learning tool is more flexible
compared to desktop computer. However, there are some
confronts towards the establishment of mobile learning in
such that Zanzibar as we illustrated in below subsections.
V. OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES
For the HLS to benefit more from their mobile phones, it’s
important to gain massive opportunity of this technology
and overcome challenges associated with the mobile
learning environment. This paper presents realistic reasons
for embedding mobile learning to engage developing
countries’ students in collaborative, communicative,
creative and easy accessible learning environment as well
as the challenges and how to overcome those challenges.
A. Opportunities of mobile learning
Encouraging Student – Centred learning: Students can
access resources according to their needs rather than their
teachers or other people’s involvement. It focuses on
student’s interests, learning styles, motivations and abilities.
Students also acquire effective learning skills that will be
valuable throughout their lives, whereby they will more
active and feel ownership of the learning process.
Mobility: The ability to link to the activities in the outside
world also provides students with the capability to ‘escape’
the classroom and engage in activities that do not
correspond with either the teacher’s agenda or the
curriculum.
Affordance of the device: Mobile phones are much
affordable than desktop and laptop computers. It shows that
HLS were not able to purchase expensive mobile phone
devices which have enough capability to support mobile
learning. This study found that more than 91% of the
respondents have their own cell phones of different types
and models. About 11% of the respondents have a smart
phone and very little amount (only 9%) that have a PDA.
Increase engagement and motivation of learning
behaviour: Mobile phone is a small device which is very
dedicated in such way that the user can play around in
his/her hands easily. In this study, most of the students
agreed the initiative of mobile learning system will
facilitate their studies. This shows that although students
were not lodged in the use of mobile phones in their
learning, they still agreed to the fact that mobile learning
will have large contribution in their studies. Thus
appropriate measures need to be taken for the government
and other stake holders to assist our students to have
modern mobile learning tools such as smart phone, PDA
and other tools to support their studies.
B. Challenges of mobile learning
Students and parents cannot afford to buy PDAs and Smart
phones: The effective use of mobile learning can only be
achieved with the use of handheld devices such as smart
phones, PDAs, and others equivalent phones. East Africa
countries, including Zanzibar is among Sub-Sahara
countries whereas the citizens are living with less than one
US dollar a day as pointed out by Aker and Mbiti [12].
Thus parents do not have enough money to buy expensive
handheld devices for their children, so the government and
other support partners should help the students to afford
such kind of phones. For instance, the initiative shown by
MOleNET in UK should be taken to the East Africa and/or
developing countries government and other development
(support) partners to support mobile learning. The
MoLeNET project invested over £12 million for purchasing
mobile devices of students, involving approximately 20,000
learners and 4000 staff in 115 colleges and 29 schools [19].
A huge range of mobile phone devices are facing support
difficult: According to Samuels [6] it was difficult to resize
the image to fit the small screen space of the mobile
devices. This is caused by the technology which is required
to make the image to be auto fit to handheld device. In fact,
this is a big challenge for the developing countries like
Zanzibar, whereby the universities don’t have mobile web
applications in place. Nevertheless, their existing web based
applications was not designed to be compatibility with hand
handle devices. Students with their mobile phones need to
scroll around into small screen. For a large company like
Google, their website is flexible enough to auto-fit the
mobile phone devices. Thus users will fill more
comfortable to use the website without scrolling around the
screen.
Poor physical infrastructure and band width which leads to
slow connectivity: Bandwidth is very important aspect to
the university. The university depends more on internet not
only for the students to read and learning with their laptop
and handheld devices but also for their internal and external
communications. Poor physical infrastructure contained to
be challenges to majority of developing countries. HLS are
facing with law internet bandwidth and connectivity.
Currently, SUZA is connected with 2mbps, and ZU is
connected with 3mbps both from Zantel internet service
provider. UCEZ is connected with 2mbps from Zanlink
internet service provider. The internet services are not
stable and make difficult for students to be connected to the
internet. Moreover, the Universities are not dedicating
certain amount of bandwidth to be used for students; as a
result the internet service becomes unreliable and
unavailable in the most of the time. Due to increasing of
computing and mobile technology with the increasing
number of student’s enrolment in each year, the universities
should have enough bandwidth for both students and staff
members.
For the experience with other country like Kenya who also
suffering with poor physical infrastructure. Kenya has
developed lively and energetic mobile phone networks.
Whereby in-service teacher training were using mobile phone
for sending bulk SMS massage to each other. This system
also can be used in peer-to-peer, in local decentralized groups
and is socially inclusive [16].
Mobile Device Variation: Technological developments
have brought about different features of mobile phones
such as different screen sizes and keypads as identified by
Nielsen [20]. This variation is one among challenges that
are observed in our findings facing the initiative of mobile
learning in HLS.
VI. RECOMMENDATIONS
Due to the fact that, students and parents cannot afford to
buy PDAs and Smart phones and others equivalent devices,
the government should have a long term strategy to
improve life standard of their people to make them able to
buy that hand handled devices which enable students in
their studies. On the other hand, internal and external
stakeholders need to be convinced to help developing
world’s students to their study.
The universities should put more emphasis on the mobile
web applications so that their web based system should
support mobile learning. For the particular universities such
as SUZA and ZU who are teaching courses like computing,
mobile technology and mobile web application
development should be given top priority in their curricula.
Whereas it will enable students to develop mobile web
applications in order to support other learning institutions
within counties.
Since the bandwidth demands for the university always is
increasing due to the growth of the universities in terms of
enrolment of the student and technology adoption, the
universities bandwidth should be further improved. Each
university should have at least 20gbps with dedicated 10
mbps for students. This will facilitates students learning and
their performance to be further improved. We recommend
that the government and other stakeholders to support the
availability of mobile devices to students helping them in
their studies.
VII. CONCLUSION
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Ltd, Publisher.

Currently, mobile learning system has not been established
in any HLI in Zanzibar. The findings of this paper show
that, there are many opportunities and demands for the use
of this technology among HLS in the developing countries
such as Zanzibar.
On the other hand, the paper also outlines a number of
challenges pertaining to the establishment and usage of
mobile phones in learning. Finally, the paper addressed the
recommendations to overcome the challenges of adopting
mobile learning to HLS.
It is clear that rapid changes of technology may overcome
the addressed challenges in this paper. Therefore, in the
future research can be conducted to recognize new
challenges at that time whist for example the deployment of
fiber optic may solve the existing bandwidth problem.
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