Learning via a Social Media Enabled Tool – Do Learning Styles Make a Difference?

Abstract

This paper investigated if students' varying learning styles affect the use of social media for learningbased on two learning styles, that is independent and collaborative. Questionnaires were used to gather the students' perceptions after using a social media enabled tool, which was specifically developed based on three key factors (i.e. Self, Effort and Function). A total of 48 students with Computer Science background were recruited to participate in the experiment. Path modeling analyses indicate the factors to predict 70% and 59% of usage among the independent and collaborative groups, respectively. Results show collaborative students to emphasize more on Function and Effort than Self, whereas Self and Effort had stronger impacts on the independent students than Function. Pair-wise comparisons revealed the differences between the learning styles to be significant for Self and Function, that is Self to be more important for independent students whereas Function was more important for the collaborative students. No significant differences were noted for Effort. The findings clearly indicate that students' learning styles play important roles in their learning activities, and hence academics should look into the possibilities of using different approaches in their teaching practices. communication to facilitate active interaction between students and their lecturers (3). Outside the classroom, social network sites were also viewed favorably in e-learning courses, particularly as a vehicle for quick and easy communication amongst students and academics (4). Educationists have also emphasized on students' learning styles, which refer to a person's preferred way of learning. Understanding students' learning styles are thus vital for educators, especially with the advent and wide use of social media tools. The current study aims to investigate if students' learning styles affect the use of social media for learning purposes. For this purpose, a prototype supporting some key functions of Facebook and YouTube were developed and tested. The results were then compared between the two groups of students. As will be presented later, overall results show different effects of the factors on the varying learning styles. The remaining structure of the paper is as follows: the related works are presented in the next section followed by the research design. Next, the results are presented and discussed before the paper is concluded.