Students' use of Facebook for learning in classroom education

This section explores how and why students of Malaysian universities used Facebook as a learning tool in classroom education. The interview participants comprised of twelve students of Malaysian universities who ranged in age from 19 to 22 years. The participants comprised of five males (S2, S3, S6, S8 and

S11) and seven females (S1, S4, S5, S7, S9, S10 and S12) from three main ethnicities – six Chinese, two Indians and one Malay – as well as three international students. Most students started to use Facebook for educational purposes when they were younger, during their secondary school days, and have from five years up to 10 years of experience of using Facebook.

Throughout each interview, four questions were discussed to allow students to describe their uses of technologies such as Facebook for learning in classroom education. In terms of frequency of Facebook usage, all students mentioned during the interviews that they logged on to Facebook daily while five of them

were on Facebook all the time. For example, S4 claimed that “literally I’m

always on Facebook. I’m constantly on Facebook”, S6 stated that “Yeah, I am on Facebook all the time but I don’t necessarily post things, I just browse through and check what’s going on… Facebook App, it’s in my phone, it’s in my tablet, in my computer”,S7 stated: “Every day, yeah it’s on 24 hours, each time around 20 minutes to check”. S8 is on Facebook “every single minute” while

S11 said: “Every day always on it. I could be there for five minutes; I could be

there for an hour.” The participants are considered heavy Facebook users who

log on to Facebook daily and this finding is consistent with Lau’s (2017) research which reveals university students participate in various social media activities on a daily basis. I found that the students in this study were not only using Facebook daily, they were constantly on Facebook – practically all the time with the use of a smartphone.

When asked about the type of technologies used besides Facebook and the university LMS, the participants listed 13 examples: Instagram (ten participants), Twitter (seven participants), Snapchat (six participants), WhatsApp (five participants), Google products (two participants), WeChat (two participants), blogs (two participants), LinkedIn (two participants), as well as one participant each who used YouTube, Tumblr, Friendster, MySpace and Mindomo. The top three most used technologies were Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. These technologies were used for personal and educational

purposes. For example, S12 used several social technologies such as “Twitter,

Instagram… mostly Facebook”, and S2 claimed using “WhatsApp, Facebook

and WeChat… for personal I think it’s more on WhatsApp, for study I use Facebook”. The students claim that various technologies were used in higher

education to help enhance their learning and teaching experience, which is in agreement with Ismael and Al-Badi (2014) who said that ‘the present-day students’ way of thinking is very different from that of students in the past. The present generations of students are mostly digital natives who enjoy learning using educational technology’ (p. 2431).

During the interviews, the students mentioned that they frequently used Facebook closed-groups and Facebook Messenger for educational purposes. The use of Facebook closed-groups was for several purposes such as: communication with lecturers and peers; discussion about assignment and course-related matters; receiving announcements and course material from lecturers; and sharing of information related to the course and assignments.

The following two excerpts of the interviews illustrate students’ uses of Facebook group and Messenger for educational purposes.

Our lecturer will just post something on Facebook, in our group, the closed- group, and maybe she asks one question then everyone will just reply… for almost every subject we have one Facebook closed-group. (S5)

We usually use Messenger, we communicate, we send our part of assignment, then we combine together, we also create a group on Facebook where we also communicate… for the events, we create groups, where we can share our knowledge, information, everything. (S9)

Two students (S5 and S9) detailed their uses of Facebook for educational purposes, for communication with the lecturers and peers, assignment discussion, questions and answers about the subject, and sharing of information about events and news.

Besides educational purposes, two students also used Facebook for personal

reasons. S6 mentioned: “For Facebook, it is more of checking how my friends

are doing, checking what people posts and all the news updates that I see from the public post. Usually I just go up there and watch whatever videos that I find interesting, see the posts about what my friends are doing and more or less just look at how things are going around my circles of social communication. I used to play a lot of games on Facebook, but I recently stopped and I’m using more of it for college life now”, while S10 was “active in terms of checking newsfeed.

I check my newsfeed, check my notification, chat with friends on the Messenger, and view information from the Facebook pages which I follow, check my friends’ pages, and get updates about my friends’ activities daily”.

Both S6 and S10 used Facebook to keep in touch with their friends and for browsing for news and videos.

The students’ use of Facebook group and Messenger for both educational and personal purposes supports the results of the study by Wang, Woo and Quek (2012) that ‘Facebook is a SNS… mainly used for making new friends, keeping contact with old friends, or sharing information and photos. It has affordances and potential for teaching and learning. The most useful component of Facebook for teaching and learning is its group. It can be used as a LMS to put up announcements, share resources, organise weekly sessions, and conduct online discussions. It can also be used by students to support their group work. By using the Facebook group, students can share information, negotiate ideas, coordinate their collaboration, and monitor their progress’ (p. 30).

In summary, most students asserted that they had used Facebook for communication with lecturers and among peers as well as for sharing and exchanging information among students. This finding concurs with past studies (Silius, Kailanto, & Tervakari, 2011; Oberer, & Erkollar, 2012; Al-Rahmi, & Othman, 2013b; Gülbahar, 2014; Herrera Batista, Tamez, & de Velasco y Arellano, 2015; Balakrishnan, 2016; Chawinga, 2017), that Facebook supports networking and social interaction, which helps students connect with lecturers and other students (Silius, Kailanto, & Tervakari, 2011; Oberer, & Erkollar,

2012; Al-Rahmi, & Othman, 2013b; Herrera Batista, Tamez, & de Velasco y Arellano, 2015; Balakrishnan, 2016) and sharing of knowledge (Gülbahar, 2014; Chawinga, 2017). Additionally, the findings on students’ uses of Facebook indicates that it gratifies students’ needs for: (1) social interaction; (2) acquiring of information and understanding of their social environment; and (3) improves social knowledge, which is consistent with the U&G theory (Quan- Haase, & Young, 2010; Tanta, Mihovilović, & Sablić, 2014; Phua, Jin, & Kim, 2017).

Based on the results obtained from the interviews with 20 Malaysian lecturer and student participants, Facebook has increasingly been used by students and faculty members in higher education in Malaysian universities. Thus, technology plays an important role in the university experience of learners as well as educators, and Facebook is stated by those interviewed to have a significant effect on teaching and learning benefit. In order to assess the actual use of Facebook by lecturers and students of a private university in Malaysia, the following section describes the results from the analysis of two Facebook closed-groups and 38 students’ reflection journals on the use of Facebook in classroom education.