The Impact of Social Networks on Students’ Academic Achievement in Practical Programming Labs

Abstract

Internet and Communication Technology (ICT) is being applied extensively in education to allow students to obtain information at anytime from anywhere. Social media is a new approach that is used to enhance and improve the delivery of education. Facebook groups and YouTube channels are the most operated networks that manage to deliver information. In this paper, we will study the impact of applying Facebook groups and YouTube videos on students’ academic achievements in computer programming labs especially in object-oriented programming 2 (OOP2) lab at the Hashemite University. The practical programming lab plays an important role in understanding the theoretical programming concepts, for this reason programming lab is chosen as a case study. The proposed methodology embeds the social media networks as new major dimension in the teaching process of OOP2 Lab side by side with traditional lectures and e-learning tool such as Moodle. In this research: three surveys are utilized respectively to inspect the reasons of the weakness in OOP2 lab, evaluate the course learning outcomes (CLOs) by students before and after applying the proposed methodology and to investigate the opinions of students toward using social media networks within learning process. The results showed that operating the social media sites used by students on a daily basis creates a friendly and close educational environment as well as enhancing the academic results of students.