Analyzing the Functions and Benefits of Using Mobile Facebook as a Supplemental LMS in Higher Education

The wide implementation of social networking sites (SNS) in many fields, for instance, government, celebrities, schools, social groups, events promoted by national organizations or private enterprises, NPOs, businesses, etc., attests to its popularity. Currently more and more educators and students have integrated these online social communication platforms into their learning environment. Learning Management Systems (LMS) also have great features and functions that may serve as a bridge between learners and educators leading to better communication, in addition to helping students increase their learning engagement and teachers in evaluating learning performance. Although many studies have investigated the effects of adopting Facebook as an additional learning management system (LMS), its functions and benefits differing from the LMS have hardly been systematically analyzed. Besides, due to the increasing popularity of mobile devices among the younger generation, university students are obviously likely to use their smart phones to access both Facebook Mobile App and school LMS. Therefore, the first purpose of this study is to determine students’ opinions on mobile Facebook course groups and a mobile LMS course group, through a survey conducted after a 2-semester experiment. The other objective of this study is to evaluate the benefits of each function of mobile FB course groups that may strengthen the current weaknesses of LMS. In addition, regression analysis and t-test were used to reveal the relationships among variables: the FB functions and its benefits for FB course group. The findings might provide a clear notion for teachers regarding the functions and advantages contributed by a mobile FB course group which can be implemented as a supplemental learning system. The results of the research will provide university administrators with more detailed information for improving the LMS’ features or developing new LMS Apps.