Facebook for Teaching and Learning and its Effect on Social Presence and Sense of Community

Facebook, the most popular worldwide Social Networking Site (Pingdom 2011), has the potential to become a course tool for building learning communities in a regular course (Mazer et al 2007; English and Duncan-Howell 2008). While students visit traditional learning management systems (LMSs) for notes only, students are willing to spend time on Facebook for social interactions. We hypothesize that using Facebook in education has positive effects in promoting 'social presence', 'sense of community' as well as "course satisfaction" among Chinese students. Increased "social presence" means students sense a more salient role in their interpersonal interactions (Short, Williams and Christie 1976). Increased "sense of community" makes students feel that classmates matter to one another and to the group (McMillan and Chavis 1986). Both entities are important in a constructivist learning environment in which learning with and from peers are of importance. In this study, we investigated the above hypothesized relationships with two cohorts of students in a Business course at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. The research method used was a questionnaire which at the end yielded 201 responses. A series of bivariate correlation and regression analyses were used to analyze the data. Results of the study in general confirmed our expectations. The use of Facebook in the course led to increased social presence as well as sense of community perceived by the Chinese students. We also found that students had a higher overall satisfaction with the course if they 1) used the course Facebook more often, 2) had a higher social presence, and 3) had a higher sense of community in the course. The experiences have also led us to be aware of a number of important areas of consideration when using Facebook for teaching and learning, including issues of privacy and control of teacher workload.