STUDENTS EXPERIENCES ON THE USE OF GOOGLE CLASSROOM: CASE STUDY OF A UNIVERSITY IN RWANDA

Abstract

Google is a popular Web 2.0 tools with many interesting facilities and applications. Like many other Web 2.0 tools, Google classroom has potential for teaching and learning due to its unique built-in functions that offer pedagogical, social and technological affordances. With this in mind, Google classroom as an open-source learning platform created in 2015 to simplify and enhance user collaboration, was considered a prominent technology tool used to enhance teaching and learning at a particular University in Rwanda. This study adopts a quantitative descriptive design to investigate university students' Google classroom experiences in Rwanda after participating in an online STEM education course. Data were collected using questionnaires sent to students via a Google form link. The collected data were analyzed using frequency and descriptive analysis. The study has generally confirmed that students have a positive cognitive, affective, and behavioural attitude towards Google classroom use. The study also revealed immediate feedback, accessibility, user-friendliness, collaboration, effective and efficient communication as positive experiences recognized by students using Google classroom in their online STEM education course. Nevertheless, students faced problems such as poor internet connection, lack of technology to access the classroom, insufficient time to submit tasks, lecturers inadequate and untimely response to students’ questions, isolated learning, poor knowledge about the user interface, inadequate skills on how to use the classroom. To further encourage the use of google classroom particularly as a learning management system in Rwandan universities and other universities across Africa, findings from this study recommends that education institutions provide students and lecturers with adequate training and platform on how to use the google classroom interface, improve ICT infrastructures, lecturers’ use of video chat or asynchronous mode to provide adequate and timely feedback to students within stipulated virtual office hours, ensure quality course content.