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2016 » Papers » Volume 2 » Usefulness of Facebook for students: analysis of university profile differences from a multidimensional perspective 1. USEFULNESS OF FACEBOOK FOR STUDENTS: ANALYSIS OF UNIVERSITY PROFILE DIFFERENCES FROM A MULTIDIMENSIONAL PERSPECTIVE Authors: Pribeanu Costin, Lamanauskas Vincentas Volume 2 | DOI: 10.12753/2066-026X-16-170 | Pages: 557-564 | Download PDF | Abstract
The change of paradigm from learner-centered to social learning requires considering various activities such as: active participation, information and content sharing, collaboration, and debate. The use of social networking websites takes a lot of time from the students' university life thus challenging the educators to look for modalities to identify and exploit their educational potential. The increasing popularity of Facebook among university students is raising several research questions regarding its usefulness for education. Therefore, a systematic study on Facebook use by university students has been started in 2014 in the framework of cooperation between researchers from ICI Bucharest (Romania) and Siauliai University (Lithuania). The objective of this paper is twofold: (a) to measure the usefulness of Facebook for university students along three dimensions: social usefulness, information usefulness and collaboration usefulness, and (b) to analyze group differences from a multidimensional perspective. In order to compare the perceptions of students two samples with a different university profile have been utilized. A multidimensional model for the perceived usefulness has been conceptualized and empirically validated on each sample using structural equation modelling. An analysis of invariance across profiles provides evidence for the configural, metric, and scalar invariance of the evaluation instrument, thus enabling comparison between groups at construct level. The university profile comparison shows mean differences as regarding the global factor and two of its dimensions: social usefulness and information usefulness. The results of this work have several implications for researchers and practitioners. First, it contributes to a better understanding of the educational potential of Facebook. Second, it contributes to a reliable evaluation instrument that performs well across groups. Third, the multidimensional perspective enables analyses on two levels (global factor and each dimension). | Keywords
Social learning, Facebook, university students, analysis of invariance, group differences, structural equation modeling |
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