Abstract:

Whatsapp Messenger, one of the social media applications on smart phone for example, has exploded in popularity recently. Many people, particularly part-time university students, has started to use this application, not only for daily communication but also for discussion on their academic tasks. Thus, the perceived high level of usage of this application amongst part-time university student in Malaysia is inevitable. However, little is understood from empirical viewpoint about the intensity of Whatsapp messenger usages and its impact on the academic performance of students in the university. This study seeks to investigate this issue that is to identify the impact of Whatsapp messenger on the performance of university students in Malaysia from the perspective of the students. To achieve this, a survey and face-to-face interviews were carried-out. 86 students participated in the survey and 15 students in the interviews. The study revealed that, Whatsapp has enhanced effective flow of information and idea sharing among students. Despite making communication easier and faster, Whatsapp has also impacted negatively on the performance of these students. The study uncovered some of the following findings: Whatsapp has taken much of students study time and concentration because they are being bordered by the incoming messages. This results in procrastination related problems, such as extinguishes student’s time management in balancing online activities, lack of concentration during lectures and academic preparation, distracts students from completing their assignments and adhering to their private studies time table, and students’ spellings and grammatical construction of sentences on assignments were also affected. In addition, some issues on the Whatsapp application were also revealed.

Keywords:

Innovation, Whatsapp Messenger, University student Performance, Business, Malaysia.