Online Interview

Somekh (2007) suggests that interviewing is a means of gaining insights into students’ knowledge and understanding. Vavoula (2005) proposes the use of interviews by mobile learning researchers as an approach based solution. This means that interviews are used for mobile learning research in order to settle hands-on problems, because through interviews “questionable accuracy of recall, the degree to post-rationalisation skews data, and the effects of the participants’ concern over image” (Vavoula, 2005, p.341) could be overcome. This means that I was also able to capture different perspectives on the use of mobile devices for learning.

In this study online interviews were used to gain feedback from students as to the possibility of providing mobile learning as an additional delivery platform, the usefulness of the mobile learning activities and also problems that the students faced, as outlined in research questions 1, 2 and 3 of this study. The reason for using the online mechanism was because it was difficult to gather students for face-to-face sessions due to their workloads and also the fact that the students and I were based in different countries.

One of the basic issues in designing for online interviews is whether the selected participant has the equipment and appropriate access for the interview to be arranged (Madge, 2006). There should be flexibility for participants to respond conveniently to the interview questions. If the interview is synchronous there is also the need to arrange an appropriate time. One of my concerns in this research was the potential transfer of costs to the participants through the use of the internet. I overcame this by ensuring that the students could use the computers at the university where my research was conducted, which have internet access.

According to James (2007), due to the lack of body language and other linguistic clues such as tone of voice, online interviews carry some disadvantages. On the other hand, I believed that the students selected were proficient and experienced in the online environment, and would be comfortable with using emoticons, for example ‘:)’ or acronyms such as ‘LOL’ (laugh out loud) to replace body language. In a similar way as with a face-to-face interview, I put my participants at ease and gained their confidence through small talk at the beginning of the

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interview session. Furthermore, I took steps to listen, reassure and develop sensitivity to comfort issues as the means to develop a personal relationship with the participants. In their study, Nik Aziah & Nik Suryani (2005) found that when they interviewed Malaysian HE students through email, there was no issue of dominant or shy participants. This encouraged me to deploy this method further.

Online interviews can be synchronous or asynchronous. Hewson & Laurent (2008) explain that asynchronous interviews tend to “generate richer, more detailed, elaborate and reflective data” (p.68) whereas a synchronous approach tends to be playful, less elaborate but captures the instincts of the participants. Therefore I decided to use synchronous interviews through individualised chat sessions with the students in order to better capture an authentic student voice. For the synchronous interview, it is felt that participants might have difficulty in catching up in real-time typing. This is because there are two skills in typing (language grammar and spelling) (Chen & Hinton, 1999) and also the difficulty of capturing the flow of thoughts. Furthermore, if English language is used, then the students need more time to write and think as this is not the participants’ first language. These were the two main issues with synchronous online interviews. I overcame them by not pushing for the students’ feedback immediately when asking a question; hence they felt at ease with the pace of the interview to provide feedback. I also allowed for the students’ use of ‘Manglish’ (Malaysian English – usage of colloquial English language that allows Malay language in the communication) which the students felt at ease to use. I believed that Malaysian HE students would be able to open up to me more through this informal chatty method that I presumed most of them were comfortable with.

I employed open questions as it gave me room for broader and general information on issues discussed (Anderson, 1998). Through this type of question I was able to find better insights from my participants. The questions also put my participants at ease as this type of question is easy to answer. Then I gradually sought out specific answers on the particular mobile learning activity that the participants had experienced. The questions asked were whether the participants found a specific mobile learning activity useful in supporting learning, and what were the environmental issues they experienced while accessing mobile learning

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activities. They were also asked questions about where they usually accessed mobile learning activities, what common application of the mobile phone, whether they were able to communicate or reflect better with applications of the mobile phone, whether they found the ubiquitous nature of the mobile phone applications useful, and whether the activities had supported them to construct their understanding of the course content. I selected the participants own chat forum as they would be familiar with it. This is to ensure that the participants felt at ease during the interview session.