Abstract:

Social media, regardless of types and functions, have “sharing” at their core structures and have demonstrated great potentials for amassing individual contributions and creating greater knowledge repositories and innovative solutions. This makes social media the most natural and logical educational technology for classroom. Surprisingly, however, doubts and hesitation still exist among researchers and teachers as to the benefits and practicality of social media in classroom. Literature in Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) reports that social media are conducive to collaborative learning thanks to their capability to facilitate real-time, social, and collaborative interaction among participants. However, little is known as to how social media aid collaborative learning for learners, what benefits and drawbacks they engender, and lastly, what challenges they pose to learners. For examples, will the presence or the absence of a leader in a collaborative process make a difference in learning outcomes? Will the degree of social presence of social media influence on information sharing and participation? And more importantly, will learners’ proficiency of social media create differences in satisfaction among learners? These questions are critical in understanding learners’ experience of CSCL using social media and in designing user-centric CSCL environments.

This study hypothesized the following.
H1: Social media proficiency is positively associated with participation through social media.
H2: Communication style is positively associated with participation through social media.
H3: Collaboration style is positively associated with participation through social media.
H4: Presence of leader is positively associated with satisfaction.
H5: Perceived social presence is positively associated with participation and satisfaction.

In terms of methods, a role-playing activity on a business problem will be used that was carefully designed to create real-life like situations and contexts where collaborative group process inevitably involves the use of communication technology. Students will be randomly assigned to teams and to a role in a virtual team, and work together with their teammates to find a solution to a problem. Throughout the activity, students will communicate with teammates only through social media of their choice. This study will collect two online survey data, pre- and post-activity surveys. The pre-activity survey measures the levels of social media proficiency, communication (in a group both in online and offline setting) and collaborative (group vs. individual) style and preference of learners and the post-activity survey measures the levels of the perceived social presence of social media they used, information sharing, participation, and overall learning outcomes and satisfaction. All measures are adapted from existing studies or created to fit to the study context. Using the data obtained from an online survey of 100 respondents, this study will examine the relationships among these variables using structural equation modeling (SEM). This paper also will discuss implications for the use of simulation activities with social media in higher education settings and future research directions.

Keywords:

Social media, higher learning, simulation, collaborative learning, CSCL.