A survey on using Facebook as a teaching and learning tool in universities of Sri Lanka

Abstract

Social media has become a trend among almost all internet users. Facebook is the social media web site that is highly popular among Sri Lankans. The purpose o{ this research was to examine the awareness of undergraduates about Facebook as a learning tool. All the data were measured via a questionnaire given to 1200 undergraduates of three government universities of Sri Lanka. Only '1000 answer scripts of undergraduates, who have been using Facebook for more than one year and spend more than 30 minutes of time with Facebook daily, were considered for the analysis. According to the results, only 4 % of undergraduates were aware that they can use Facebook as a tool for their learning process whereas 82% of undergraduates use Facebook to socialize after their studies. Also, 14 % of undergraduates believe that Facebook is the media to express their political and social views to general public. Facebook provides a well built platform for collaborative learning by making strong interaction between student to student and student to facilitator. Facebook supports to build student or subject communities to share knowledge with multimedia content. Further Facebook provides a democratic environment for each student to express their ideas in various methods as they wish. However, according to our suryey, undergraduate students are not using facilities available in Facebook for their learning process. Therefore, it is a required to guide undergraduates to use social media for their learning and promote to the use of social media as teaching and learning tools in academic process. As a result of unawareness and lack of guidance, freely available facilities such as social media are being ignored by a majority of undergraduates in sri Lankan universities.