The Relationship between Learning Styles and the Social Network Use of Tertiary Level Students

Abstract

Online social networking has become an inevitable part of a human society. As more students have now spent a great extent of their time participating in online social network sites, it could become a valuable tool to enhance student learning. In order to implement online social network in learning effectively, student individual differences in terms of learning styles should be taken into considerations. This paper presents the preliminary findings from a study of students’ learning styles and their interactions on an online social network site, the relationships between the two, and discussions on how teachers could use students’ popular online social network sites to promote their learning. In this paper, surveys on social network site use and the Index of Learning Styles (ILS) were administered to 379 tertiary students from five different faculties. The analysis focuses on the relationships between student learning styles and their online social network uses. The results are expected to help assisting instructors on how to effectively plan the use of social network to enhance their students’ learning.