Constructivist approach and use of social media for student learning in higher education

Abstract

Use of social media together with traditional classroom activities have been more widely adopted in universities for teaching and student learning. Meanwhile, teaching approach has become more student-centered, meaning that the instructors feature less prominently in the course of teaching, but remain the planner, learning designer and facilitator. The effectiveness of such constructivist blended learning experience is arguable. We therefore conducted a pilot study on examining the impacts of the use of social media for students to work on their assignments, i.e. YouTube Digital Storytelling and Facebook article production, while teachers acted like a facilitator granting students space for active participation in the discussions. For the YouTube assignment, the undergraduate students who enrolled in a biometrics course in the University of Hong Kong (HKU) were invited in the study (n=24) while the target participants of the Facebook task were the postgraduates taking an environmental management course in HKU (N=123) and an education course in the Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK) (n=26). Students were asked to reflect their blended learning experience through completing a self-administered questionnaire. The survey results revealed that the use of online platforms could achieve the learning outcomes successfully. With teacher’s facilitation and the use of such social media platforms, students could interact more and build up a stronger community to share their knowledge. On the other hand, privacy was a concern raised by the students (one-way ANOVA, p < 0.0001) which may hinder their knowledge exchange through the online platform. Students who used YouTube as an assignment tool reflected that the assignment did not encourage them to learn the subject further, implying video production may interfere deep learning. Based on the results of this study, social media (e.g. YouTube and Facebook) can be seen as a useful educational tool for teaching and learning in higher education. To explore the education value of blended learning, further studies on scrutinizing the effectiveness of the use of other online platforms should be conducted.