Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Language, Education, and Innovation 2018
978-967-15257-9-1

Facebook as a Learning Tool among Undergraduate Students of Private Higher Learning Institutions in Malaysia

Siti Intan Nurdiana Wong Abdullah, Dominic Wong

INTI International University,Nilai, Malaysia

Tunku Abdul Rahman University College, Malaysia

ABSTRACT

The Malaysian Education Blueprint 2015-2025 stresses on the importance of harnessing the power of technology-based learning to make Malaysia a high-income nation. To achieve this aim, private higher learning education institutions are required to use blended learning modes for at least 70% of their programme starting with undergraduate programmes. Currently, millennials age between 18 and 34 years old in Malaysia are one of the highest users of social media especially Facebook (FB). Among many other e-learning tools such as Blackboard™, Moodle, and Course Networking (CN) but FB is a powerful social media tool that has influenced many university students’ lives and has become an integral part of their learning environment. Thus, this study aims to determine the usage of Facebook as a learning support tool especially among undergraduate students in Malaysia’s private higher learning education institutions. This study is drawn from TAM (Technology Acceptance Model), which has been a widely used model for predicting user acceptance of innovations but with an inclusion of perceived interactivity. Empirical results from 225 respondents in three private learning institutions in Malaysia through questionnaire confirmed that together, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and perceived interactivity explained nearly 60% of the variance in attitude towards Facebook as an e-learning tool. All hypothesized relationships were significantly positive with perceived interactivity as the highest contributor and subsequently confirmed that attitude led to usage intention. Based on these findings, recommendations were proposed to enhance undergraduate students’ perception towards Facebook’s effectiveness, convenience and mutual collaboration to produce more positive attitude and intention to use it as a learning tool.

KEYWORDS

Social networking sites, Facebook™ usage, e-learning tool, private higher learning institutions