Modelling Facebook usage for collaborative learning in higher education

Social networking sites (SNSs), especially Facebook, have made deep inroads in the teaching-learning process worldwide. The purpose of this paper is to understand the key factors which influence a students’ intention to use Facebook for academic usage.

A web-based questionnaire survey was administered among 218 students enrolled in higher education programme of universities/institutions in National Capital Territory of Delhi. The relationship among the proposed variable were tested through structural equation modelling and neural network (NN) approach. SEM is used to identify and validate the factors significant to influence the intention to use Facebook among students. To further find which of the factors are more influential, factors NN with tenfold cross-validation was used to identify the factors which are more influential among the ones proposed in this study.

The results suggested that the proposed framework has a good fit and the five relationships hypothesized were found to be significant; thus, establishing that the antecedent factors have a positive influence on the intention of users (student) to actively use Facebook as an academic medium for collaborative learning.

This study establishes that the antecedent factors identified in the course of this study have a positive influence on the intention to use Facebook for higher academics and collaborative learning by the students. This paper suggests and supports the adoption and usage of Facebook as a learning tool for higher academics.