This paper was developed within the scope of a PhD thesis that intends to characterize the use of mobile applications by the students of the University of Aveiro during class time. The main purpose of this paper is to present the results of an initial pilot study that aimed to fine-tune data collection methods in order to gather data that reflected the practices of the use of mobile applications by students in a higher education institution during classes. In this paper we present the context of the pilot, its technological settings, the analysed cases and the discussion and conclusions carried out to gather mobile applications usage data logs from students of an undergraduate degree on Communication Technologies.Our study gathered data from 77 participants, taking theoretical classes in the Department of Communication and Arts at the University of Aveiro. The research was based on the Grounded Theory method approach aiming to analyse the logs from the access points of the University. With the collected data, a profile of the use of mobile devices during classes was drawn.The preliminary findings suggest that the use of apps during the theoretical classes of the Department of Communication and Art is quite high and that the most used apps are Social networks like Facebook and Instagram. During this pilot the accesses during theoretical classes corresponded to approximately 11,177 accesses per student. We also concluded that the students agree that accessing applications can distract them during these classes and that they have a misperception about their use of online applications during classes, as the usage time is, in fact, more intensive than what participants reported.

The proliferation of mobile devices and mobile applications has changed the way people communicate, work, and study, namely in higher education contexts. However, users have very different application usage habits from each other, and the data collecting instruments that typically support the studies usually rely on the perception that users report on their use. Hence, the reported user perception may not match the actual usage. Based on an exploratory approach, this article aims to analyze the use of mobile applications by students at the University of Aveiro. The study has a mixed approach that contemplates non-participant observation, the application of a survey, and log analysis. The triangulation between log records, the obtained data from the non-participant observation, and the surveys allows for a more objective assessment of the user profiles and will help to identify potential discrepancies between self-perception and actual use of mobile devices. The main conclusions show that the usage is quite significant and there is a huge tendency for the use of social media during classes. The most used applications are social networks which had a more intensive use than reported in the surveys. The methodology is also an important output of this study.

This paper was developed within the scope of a PhD thesis that pretends to characterize the use of mobile applications by University of Aveiro students during class time. The main purpose of this paper is to detail the processes used in an initial pilot study that aimed to fine-tune data collection methods in order to gather data that reflected the practices of the use of mobile applications by students in a higher education institution during classes. In this study we detail all the decisions and procedures carried out to gather mobile applications usage data logs from students of a Multimedia Laboratory course belonging to an undergraduate degree on Communication Technologies. The preliminary findings suggest that the use of apps during theoretical classes of the Department of Communication and Art is quite high and the procedures to develop this kind of studies should be very carefully planned, with deeper thought of categorization of data logs, so that the research can be more valid from a scientific and academic point of view..