2015 Fifth International Conference on e-Learning
Twitter Scheduler System as e-Learning Tool Dr. Ali AlSoufi
Aysha Obead, Sara AlThawadi, Zanab AlHayki
Information System Department University of Bahrain Manama, Bahrain
[email protected]
Information System Department University of Bahrain Manama, Bahrain {a.mo7md, sara.althawadi, z_alhayki}@gmail.com
characters or less properly? Whether Twitter can be an effective teaching and learning tool? What do students say about using Twitter for course communication and education? When is the best time to post and read tweets as student? The collected data would then be used as input to support developed system to schedule Twitter messages (tweets) to test the applicability of using bulk scheduled messages as a supporting tool in the learning process at UOB.
Abstract— Social media in the educational field has become desirable and targeted because of its familiarity among people. Twitter is one such social media applications that has a feature of quickly spreading the news as they occur in real time. It has a text limit of 140 letters, which could be really interesting to use as an e-learning tool. The purpose of this paper is to; 1. Identify the susceptibility of University of Bahrain's (UOB) students to use Twitter as part of their education process, 2. Identify the preferred time when the students use Twitter, 3. Use the outcome of the first two objectives in developing a prototype that works as Twitter scheduling system to test the applicability of using bulk scheduled messages as a supporting tool in the learning process. The results of the research revealed that students at UOB do use Twitter heavily were happy to use it as an e-learning tool. Furthermore it found that the preferred times are from 9-11 pm, 11 pm – 1 am and 10 am – 12 pm. These timings were then used by UOB teachers to set up their bulk messages in the developed twitter scheduler system mentioned earlier. The system enables teachers to organize, customize and save their messages (tweets) for later use and reuse. Finally, it is important to notes that such system would server many other sectors; such as marketing campaigns, NGO’s awareness campaigns, health education and awareness by governmental agencies, member’s communication and education tools in political and professional societies.
II.
Twitter goes beyond personal use and can be purposeful in many different areas like: personal, news, religion, policy, sports and learning. In the news field, Twitter is used as learning tool of events and information as they occur for this reason Twitter called 'real time social networking' site. The simple format of Twitter messages and the nearaccessibility of the network with tweet-via-SMS functionality as ultimate fallback combine to make live tweeting a more important practice on Twitter than comparable live activities have been for previous platforms. Such activities now not only include actual eyewitnesses on the ground for events reporting, from live coverage of the East to West events such as: the US Airways Hudson River crash in January 2009 being first reported via the online service [2] to the unwitting live account of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound by an Abbottabad local [3], news spread occurrence on the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, which led to the spread of some 140,000 tweets per hour including the word ‘tsunami’ in the hours instantly after the earthquake [4] and many other events that coverage by Twitter not only by texting, but with links, photos, video, and audio (Rich media). Secondly, Twitter is also used widely for improve business such as: in marketing campaigns, advertising about products, to communicate with customers and more [5]. Business people who need to promote their products and services, companies who need to become popular find Twitter a very appropriate and user friendly way of spreading word and advertising [6]. The NBA’s Phoenix Suns is best example, who is turning online connections into real ones with Twitter. Suns developed special promotions to connect with fans at game only by communicating with their fans online [7]. Finally, education sector also experimenting with Twitter. It is noticeable that University students use social media heavily throughout the day. This gives an opportunity
Keywords- Twitter scheduler system; e-learning tool; social media; online learning.
I.
INTRODUCTION
Web 2.0 is new virgin of web 1.0 technologies, which is two ways to communicate between two or more sites and its visitors. Web 2.0 is user generated content that let its visitors to upload, read, post images, text and video content on website pages. Web 2.0 is compatible with social media and social software in meaning [1]. Social media is three ways communication method that is between sites, its visitors and its members. The visitors can generate contents, share information and communicate with each other. Popular examples of social networking sites include Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, YouTube and Google+. These entire social sites are Web 2.0 tools, which make the communication process easier between users. The purpose of this paper is, to explore university of Bahrain student’s perceptions towards using Twitter for educational purposes and evaluate their behavior towards it. Hence Answer questions such as; how to utilize 140 978-1-4673-9431-4/15 $31.00 © 2015 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ECONF.2015.54
LITERATURE REVIEW
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for educators to utilize social media as of the teaching tools. They help to raise communication between students and instructors. Even healthcare students found social media helpful and used as a tool of information sharing [8]. The usage of social media and particularly Twitter could explain in many learning theories and academic researches. Twitter used in almost every area and has a large affective area; according to it is the modal properties and its user’s scope [9] and [10] found many surveys indicate that Twitter used to improve education with uses range from sharing different experiences during educational conferences on Twitter. Also as example, using Twitter to alert students to announcements and extra credit opportunities, group communication, volunteering works, to ease class discussion inside and outside of the classroom [11]. An example is Dr. Monica Rankin at University of Texas in Dallas using Twitter in her USA history course [12]. She found it very helpful to increase student’s engagement during her lectures (especially shy ones). Another example mentioned by López-Zafra [13] that Twitter was very powerful in motivating students in a business statistics course in a private school in Madrid, Spain. Furthermore, there is an interesting collaborative writing project that students used Twitter to add a narrative 140 characters at a time and only have 140 posts to tell a whole story based on the Twitter story framework [14]. As well, for system development process we studied and reviewed similar systems from the literature and search engines. The aim was to learn their functionalities, features and weaknesses so that we could adopt and consider in the design of our target system, considering that the system would be developed in a prototype environment to prove the concept. In next stage, the system was further enhanced toward a more stable usable e-learning tool ready to be used for UOB students/teachers. III.
C. Data sample In our study we selected University of Bahrain's students randomly from all colleges. We used the simple random sample which is considering a specific number of the student of the university to represent the method; in this study we represented almost 374 of student from all departments in the University. We used online calculator (http://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm ) to get the sample of student at UOB with 95% of confidence level and only 5% of confidence interval, so the sampling for 12,709 students was around 374 students. D. Instrument • Questionnaire helps to provide a description of the trends in a population or a description of the relationships between its variables [16]. In a structured questionnaire, participants respond to prompts by selecting from predetermined answers and analyzed quantitatively. Our questionnaire contained four parts: perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, confirmation and satisfaction • Interview. Reference [17] mentioned, to overcome the poor response rates of a questionnaire survey the interview has been introduced. So we used the interview to identify more factors that will help as to conclude our results. There are three main type of interview; structured, semi-structured and unstructured. The structured interview is similar to surveys but it is verbal rather than writing and use predefined questions to ask the interviewee. The unstructured interview is the opposite of structured, it doesn’t use predefined questions and started detailed knowledge and preparation to achieve deep insights interviewee [18]. The semi-structured is the best, because it gives the interviewer more space to speak and clarify. Semi-structured interview allows for the clarification of interesting and related issues rose by the respondents [17] and obtain valuable and complete information [19], [17], [20] and are generally analyzed qualitatively. In our project we used the three types of interview to collect more comprehensive data.
METHODOLOGY
A. Research methodology The researcher used the mixed approach (quantitative & qualitative) to gather data from different recourses such academic publications, industry standards, interviews and distribute a survey to the students of university of Bahrain. The survey studied the students' behavior in Twitter usage and best time of these usages.
E. Data analysis The questionnaire distributed to a sample of 374 UOB’s students. A total of 133 surveys were returned that led to a response rate of 36%. Using Google survey form and manually by hand the questionnaire distributed. The Researchers used Statistical Package for Social Scientists (SPSS) tool to analyze the collected data.
B. Theoretical model • In this study authors focused on Extended ECM-IT as a research model because it's give better understanding for users behaviors as its combing two models (TAM & ECM-IT). • Extended ECM-IT: is a hybrid expectationconfirmation model in the IT domain that was developed by Hong et al. (2006). It is an integrates of both TAM and ECM-IT models which may lead to better explain users' continued IT usage behavior [15].
F. Twitter scheduler system development In this section we give a brief description of the developed Twitter scheduler system. The research team have spent majority of its time designing and developing the prototype. The system utilizes Twitter engine to schedules user tweets on user’s specified time/date. The Tweets are saved in a database till reached its time then it will post on Twitter engine, where it then pushes them to the target users.
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IV.
The server checks the tweets in the system between time and time to ensure that the tweets are published in their right time, including new tweets that have been created recently. See Figure 1. From Teachers’ side (admin side) they have messages, concepts, announcement and other staff to publish to their students. In each semester, and for each course they teach, instead of creating them again many times they just save their previously created messages as tweets and posted on Twitter. In this way, teachers will save time and effort by customize their topic tweet and reuse them many times in future. See Figure 2. The system has two dashboards: one for admin and the other for teachers. The admin add users (teachers) accounts then users can add subjects (courses) about specific concepts. Under each subject could be many topics (chapters) related to particular subject and so on.
RESULT & DISCUSSION
A. Findings The authors found that (82.4%) of UOB’s student are using E-learning tools such Blackboard and Moodle and (79.4%) of students are using Twitter as e-learning tool. See Table 1 and 2. With regards to the frequency using Twitter, the study revealed that (39.7%) of students are using Twitter slightly more than 30 times per day and their best time to use Twitter to read, tweet and retweet is between 9 to 11 PM (32.8%). According to the result, the majority of students preferred Twitter highest compared to other popular social medias in Bahrain (Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp). They believed that with Twitter they can be reached anywhere and anytime, more flexible to interact with and easy to use. Finally, (56.5%) of the students responded that they are satisfied with their experience of using Twitter, while (26.7%) were neutral and only (13%) were fairly satisfied. Furthermore, (74%) of UOB’s student were seeing twitter as a good tool that support learning. B. Extra findings While analyzing the questionnaire the researcher found extra interesting data about UOB’s students. Most responses were from IT College (41.4%) with majority of respondents being female students (63.9%) and male students (31.6%). We found that female students were using Twitter more than male students and they were satisfied (86.7%) more than male students (13.3%). This relates to the fact that social media fills the social gaps of female users, while male users (especially students) have other social interests such sport activity. The cultural and social impacts of Twitter of UOB students is beyond the scope of this study and hence could tackled in futures work. Furthermore, the majority of students who use Twitter were from Information Technology (IT) College (48.1%), while the majority that were not using Twitter were from Science College (47.8%). On the other hand, we found that best time to use Twitter for all students with different levels of study is from 9-11PM, however, in particular the freshman students were using Twitter heavily during exams period (45.5%), sophomore and junior students were using Twitter at lectures time (25% - 50%), while senior students were using Twitter after 1 AM (37.5%). With regards to using UOB Learning Management System (LMS), IT College is at the top (43.5%) then Business College (29.6%) while other colleges are very light users. This reflects that fact that LMS usage is not mandatory at UOB, which would hinder any future applications of eLearning within colleges. This would be a recommendation to UOB’s top management to consider.
Figure 1. Conceptual view of the Scheduler System.
Figure 2. The Data structure of the Scheduler System.
TABLE I.
STUDENT USING UOB’S LMS USAGE Frequency
163
Percentage
Total used
108
82.4%
Total not used
19
14.5%
TABLE II.
STUDENT USING TWITTER AS E-LEARNING TOOL Frequency
Percentage
Total using
104
79.4%
Total not using
23
17.6%
V.
[4]
[5]
CONCOLUSION
The paper described the research that is combination of both research and system development. The research had two main objectives, which are using Twitter as e-Learning tool and the student preferred time to use it. In order to achieve these objectives, a mixed methodology was used; a questionnaire was distributed to the UOB's students and an interview conducted with different persons. The results disclose that most of UOB's students are encouraged and support using Twitter as learning tool. Also, the best three times to use Twitter respectively are: from 9 to 11 PM, 11 PM to 1 AM and 10 AM to 12 PM. The objectives of the Twitter scheduler system are to schedule teacher's bulk messages (tweets) that related to specific course/chapter and use it for education purposes, as an e-Learning tool. The system was designed to be generic enough to be used for other applications such as marketing campaigns and NGOs awareness and educational campaigns. As a future work, teachers could be given more controls on time, add dashboard for the students and make it more like mini LMS based system on Twitter. Furthermore a study to be carried out to focus on the social and cultural impact of Twitter on UOB’s students and its relationship on e-Learning.
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10] [11]
[12]
[13]
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
[14]
We would like to thank all UOB students who were part of this study. Especial thanks to IT College, Information System department team that supported us throughout our degree, supervision of our senior project and the knowledge we gained from them to achieve this study and further our career.
[15]
[16] [17]
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