Abstract—The current technological revolution must be
harnessed to increase access to information and help
communities in developing countries make informed decisions
that can improve their standard of life. The purpose of this
study was to develop an app that attempts to complement
traditional media by improving access to timely and relevant
information to enhance teaching and learning in deprived rural
contexts. The process was guided by design science research
methodology. The paper responds to three questions: the
processes considered for effective development of apps in
resource-constrained environments; the value of mobile apps in
supporting teaching; and how mobile apps transform deprived
rural institutions. As part of the design research, the
rural-university community was engaged in the construction of
an app enabling access to educational information, registration
portals, fee balances, and coursework. The findings indicate
that the app was useful, easy to learn, and provided utility to its
users, which consequently transformed their university life. The
paper concludes by arguing that in a deprived learning context,
mobile apps have the impetus to bridge the rural-urban
dichotomy and recentre rural contexts in a direction for
sustainable learning.
Index Terms—Information and communication technology,
mobile application, rural context, sustainable learning.
Vusumuzi Maphosa is with Lupane State University, Zimbabwean, South
Africa.
Bekithemba Dube and Thuthukile Jita are with University of the Free
State, Zimbabwean, South Africa (e-mail: dubeb@ufs.ac.za).
Cite: Vusumuzi Maphosa, Bekithemba Dube, and Thuthukile Jita, "Sustainable Information and Learning Access at a Rural University in Zimbabwe through a Mobile Application," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 82-87, 2021.
Copyright © 2021 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).