INTRODUCING WHATSAPP AS A LEARNING TOOL IN COMPUTER ENGINEER

Increased use of social networks (SNs), i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or WhatsApp, constitutes an undeniable reality and are the most common way of sociocultural interaction for the youth. Based on this influence, it is proposed new educational methods based on SNs standing out the importance in education due to the fluency in the communication between teachers and students. Moreover, SNs allow the communication with experts in specific subjects and students from different places and the accessibility of information to students to complete the diary tasks in a self-didactic and efficient way, increasing the educational community feeling. In addition, these networks might incorporate multimedia tools, such as videos, web links, tutorials and animations, which allow creating private spaces in order to impart lectures or subjects. As previously mentioned, these networks facilitate student self-learning, making possible to follow up the learning process by teachers, helping them to improve the weakness of the process.

This paper shows a study about a WhatsApp social network group named FísicaGroup which can be accessed directly, automatically and ubiquitously. This work is focused on the influence study of the social networks employment of like complementary instrument in the educational methodology. With this aim SNs utilization has been promoted and favored between the students in the Physics subject teaching of the Computer Engineering degree.

To assess the opinions of the students about the use of these networks in education, an anonymous previous questionnaire was first designed and later answered by the students, through a Moodle questionnaire. The majority of responses were in favor of the use of social networks, both as instruments of news dissemination and as teaching tool.

The final evaluation, after the implementation of the WhatsApp group, has been made using an anonymous additional questionnaire.

As a result of this study, it was found that students appreciated networks, based on the accessibility of information, the feedback during the process, the useful virtual training experiments and video tutorials. Social networks, WhatsApp, are used for almost all students (95%); for this reason, according to students´ opinion SNs represent a powerful and useful tool to improve the communication between teachers and learners (100 %), in this on-line learning context. The social network implemented in this work helped students to easily access to information from any location (98%). Moreover, it has been demonstrated that the use of on-line training combined with traditional learning increases the probability of a successful score in the final exams of the Physics subject (50%).