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Sophomore Students’ Acceptance of Social Media for Managing Georeferenced Data in a Socially-Enhanced Collaborative Learning Process

Abstract:

Social media has been influencing different initiatives of collaborative learning during the last decade. Nevertheless, the lack of studies on the acceptance of georeferenced data in social media as well as the relevance of specific features in education has been identified as a missing point in this research area. In this scenario, this paper evaluates the technology acceptance of a Facebook group and a georeferenced wiki as learning tools. The study was carried out with the participation of 250 sophomore students of software engineering at the Universidad Técnica de Ambato. A controlled experiment was designed based on the Technology Acceptance Model. After using the evaluated tools for eigth weeks, two surveys were conducted and 52 participants were interviewed. The results show that both, the perceived ease of use and the perceived usefulness of the analyzed tools have a positive impact on the behavioral intention of using social media in learning processes. No significant differences were found but both tools had positive acceptance among students. Moreover, the interviewed students have the opinion that an hybrid model of socially-enhanced collaborative learning, based on Facebook and wikis of georeferenced data, has a positive impact on collaborative learning.