Mobile Phones as Primary Learning Devices in Global Higher Education
I spent the past week in South Africa at STADIO's Annual Academic Conference and our own Cape Town Canvas User Group. As expected, we talked extensively about AI and student engagement. These are critical conversations, and I'm grateful for all of them.
In addition to those timely topics, another theme arose that seemed to resonate throughout the course of the event, and has stuck with me to a point where I think it’s worth addressing, especially since it’s probably being discussed in classrooms around the globe: how much of higher education's actual learning is now happening on a mobile phone?
The question showed up in ways both small and large. During the Canvas User Group, when we opened the floor for attendees to ask questions of other institutions, more than one came back about mobile, including:
- How do institutions develop content for the mobile app, in this case in the South African context, when some students are learning exclusively on their phones?
- How do institutions solve connectivity issues for students who may be using older devices with real limitations compared to newer operating environments?
- How do technology providers keep innovating on the mobile experience as much as, if not more than, the desktop one?
The mobile classroom today
During the week’s events, engagement research shared during one of the STADIO sessions surfaced student frustrations with inconsistent, clunky mobile experiences. I don't think that's a coincidence, and I don't think it's temporary. It's part of a shift that's been building for over a decade, as access to education spreads across every hour of the day and every context a student might be in. As learners become more vigilant in unearthing tools to offer personalized learning, their mobile device is as important as it comes. A learner’s mobile device is arguably the most impactful tool outside the classroom, but many institutions are late to the game in providing mobile-first course content.
The research backs this up, with an important nuance. In a multi-year study out of the University of Central Florida, published in EDUCAUSE Review, 81% of students said they used a smartphone at least once a week for learning, yet 82% still named the laptop as the device they use most for academic work. Phones aren't replacing laptops for most students at the moment, but that day may be coming soon. They're already doing far more of the heavy lifting than we tend to assume, and for a meaningful share of students, the laptop isn't the reliable option it is for everyone else.
Mobile offers “on their schedule” learning
Across the globe, the average age of a student entering higher education, traditional and non-traditional alike, keeps climbing. Many are managing jobs and families alongside coursework. This means studying no longer happens just in a dedicated block of time. It happens in the gaps: a commute, a lunch break, the ten minutes before a child wakes up. In the US alone, adult learners over 25 made up nearly a quarter of undergraduates enrolled in 2023, and 69% of them were working while earning their degree. For students living that reality, a phone in a pocket is simply more reliable than a laptop that has to be found, opened, and sat down with.
In many parts of the Global South, bandwidth is significantly limited, and a phone is often the only device a student has. A phone, and nothing else. Look at the numbers: across Sub-Saharan Africa, the region's mobile internet user base is projected to grow from roughly 320 million in 2023 to 518 million by 2030. For a large and growing number of learners, mobile isn't a preference. It's the only door in.
Learning better in their comfort spot
And some students simply prefer their phone. It's the device they're fluent in, and it fits the efficiency habits they've already built into the rest of their lives. This preference shows up even where cost isn't the constraint: in the US, Pew Research Center found that 27% of adults ages 18 to 29 are now "smartphone dependent," meaning they own a smartphone but don't subscribe to home broadband at all, and home broadband subscription in that age group has actually declined, from 78% in 2023 to 71% in 2025. For a rising share of young adults, the phone isn't the backup plan. It's the plan.
Put all of this together, and you get a student population for whom mobile isn't a secondary access point. For a growing share, it's the primary one, or the only one. That has real consequences we haven't fully absorbed as educators. It changes what a learning app has to do well, not as an afterthought to the desktop experience, but as the main event. It also changes how we should build a course in the first place: what fits into a five-minute window, what genuinely needs a keyboard and an hour, and whether we've actually embraced what "mobile-first" means, rather than just saying it.
In full transparency, I don't have the answers. What I have are a lot of questions.
- If learning is shifting to mobile-first for a majority of students, should we be rethinking the process of learning itself, not just the interface it runs on?
- Does this open up more room for authentic and experiential learning, the kind that doesn't live inside a text box at all?
- How do we lean into what mobile devices do well, and in some cases better than a desktop, instead of just working around their limits?
- And here's the one I suspect unsettles educators most: is this the beginning of the end for long-form writing as a primary way students demonstrate what they know?
What I do have is a real desire to explore them in the coming months with other educators. Given what I heard this past week, I think it's time we lean fully into a mobile-led learning experience, and begin to meaningfully reckon with everything that means for how we design and deliver learning.
