One strand of the Intute Mobile Internet Detective project has been to engage with student users:

• to provide user data to allow a full development of the proposed service in a way which is aligned to student user needs;

• to discover the user requirements for the Mobile Internet Detective with a view to designing a technical specification for a prototype tool.

The qualitative research with second year undergraduate students from a range of disciplines and universities, consisted of four focus groups and eight depth interviews, held in Manchester and London. The research was conducted by FDS International on behalf of Intute and the findings reinforce the motivation behind the work of the project, which is to provide a user friendly mobile site that is fast and inexpensive to load, providing the right content, presented in the right order and with an adapted layout.

Information Literacy

Overall it was clear from across the focus groups and depth interviews that students received low quality training on using the Internet for academic research, with most guidance limited to using on-line university library resources and a broad introduction on how to use search engines. Students also explained how tutors typically suggest the types of resources students should either rely on or avoid, but often these resources were limited in their range of information.

Use of the Mobile Internet

The extent to which the mobile Internet was used varied greatly, with only a small number of students using their mobile Internet for academic work. Given the cost and generally slow access to the Internet from mobile devices, primarily determined by the type of contract and the handset, most students only ever occasionally accessed the Internet using their mobile phone for social purposes and for short durations of time. Consequently, those most likely regularly to access the internet on their mobile phones possessed new telephones with large screens, and had a contract which included free internet access. These represented only a small fraction of those interviewed.

Despite the fact that students rarely used the mobile Internet for their university course, many stated that they would if:

• their phones had larger screens;

• it was quick and easy to load and navigate websites; and

• it was cheaper or free (included in their contract) to access the Internet.