Effectiveness and obstacle of using Facebook as a tool to facilitate student-centred learning in higher education

The study was administered for the students enrolled in two courses in the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd), respectively. Details of the courses and the number of participants are shown in Table 1.

Table 1: Courses that applied Facebook as a tool for assessment

	HKU (N=123)	HKIEd (N=26)
Course name	Environmental Quality Management	Trends and Development in General Studies
Course level	Master of Science in Environmental Management Year 1	Postgraduate Diploma in Education Programme (Part-time) Year 2
Data collection year	2010-11 (n=41); 2012-13 (n=42); 2014-15 (n=40)	2012-13 (n=26)

For the HKU study, the lecturer asked the students to identify, by using two pictures (each with a caption of no more than 200 words), the pressing environmental issues in Hong Kong. Students had to send the pictures and their captions to the lecturer via email and then the lecturer would upload the pictures onto the Facebook page developed exclusively for the course. Students were then arranged to conduct oral presentations of the pictures (a maximum of five minutes) by using the Facebook platform. The context, content, quality and alacrity of pictures and captions, as well as the effectiveness of the oral communication were assessed. This kind of arrangement had been repeated in the course for three cohorts.

The design of the HKIEd study resembled that of its HKU counterpart, with very minor differences in the administration procedures. Instead of having the lecturer to centralize the collection of the pictures and captions for mass uploading, the students in HKIEd uploaded the pictures and captions on their own to the common Facebook account created by the lecturer. This kind of assessment was innovative in the courses of HKIEd at that time.

After the oral presentation, all the students were asked to complete a questionnaire comprising thirteen items (using a 5-point scale that ranged from strongly disagree to strongly agree) with an objective to find out the responses of the students toward the incorporation of Facebook in their coursework and their perception about achievement of the intended learning outcomes. Descriptive figures of the results were reported in terms of percentage and the questions were further categorized into: a) Difficulty in completing the assignment (Q1); b) Enjoyment in the assignment (Q3, 4, 5); c) Use of Facebook for learning (Q6, 9); d) Privacy issues due to the use of Facebook (Q7, 8); e) Intended learning outcomes (Q2, 10, 11, 12); and f) Overall achievement of learning outcomes (Q13). The questionnaire was designed, basing on a thorough analysis of the literature reviewed in the study. The pedagogical, social and technological affordances of using Facebook group as a LMS (Wang, Woo, Quek, Yang and Liu, 2012) and the Technological Acceptance Model of Davis (1989) were referred to in the design of the themes a), b), c) and d). More specifically, as the study also aimed to find out if the learning objectives of the course (in enabling students to be more creative, and more aware and knowledgeable of the environmental problems) were attained, questions in themes e) and f) were developed (Kitchakarn, 2016).

The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (IBM SPSS Statistics Version 23.0) was used for the quantitative data analysis. The differences among groups were assessed by the analysis of variance (ANOVA). Multiple regression analysis was used for determining the association among different parameters. The significance level was set at p < 0.05.