Use of Mobile Apps by the Medical College Students of Karnataka for Accessing Electronic Resources: A Survey

The trend in learning has drastically changed with the advent of information technology and its allied tools. As far as the students are concerned, updating on the latest trends in their domain is essential to have a cutting edge in this ever-changing world. For medical students, this is the need of the hour as they have to deal with challenging situations involving human lives throughout their career. Hence, a deep survey to check the length of usage of ICT skills and its tools by the medical students was conducted. The paper elaborates the types of mobile devices, types of apps, time spent on apps, the commonly used apps to access electronic resources, type of medicalapps and advantages in using these apps by 1150 medical students sampled based on the method of stratified random sampling technique. These sample students belong to 16 medical colleges that have been functioning for at least 25 years in Karnataka. The methodology used was a questionnaire to elicit data from all sample students. Wherever necessary, interview and observation methods also were used. The analysis showed that ‘smartphone’ is used by the majority of the sample population. Regarding the type of apps used by medical students, it was found that 100% of them use ‘Medical-related apps’ and among the apps, ‘MedCalc’ is the most sought-after. 99.4% of the total students sampled opined that they were ‘looking for medical information.’