Exploring Learners’ Attitude toward Facebook as a Medium of Learners’ Engagement during Covid-19 Quarantine

• Main Authors: Meisam Moghadam, Habibeh Shamsi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) 2021-03-01
• Series: Open Praxis
• Subjects: facebook; learners’ attitude; sociocultural theory; web 2.0 technology; engagement; language learning
• Online Access: https://openpraxis.org/index.php/OpenPraxis/article/view/1163

The rapid transition to online teaching because of the global disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic exclaimed all the educators on finding the most efficient ways to teach in the presence of all rampant limitations caused in both social and academic lives. Facebook, as one of the favorite social networks, having hundreds of millions of users, is an enticing way for the teachers and students to form an online community. With this regard, the purpose of the present study is to explore the attitude and viewpoints of language learners toward implementing Facebook as a peripheral medium, besides the formal e-learning platform used in the classroom, to engage learners in language learning and explore its effectiveness in the process of teaching. Moreover, this study aims to explore learners’ attitudes through the lens of the sociocultural theory. To this end, participants were chosen based on availability sampling, and the online versions of two surveys, Facebook Online Survey and Usefulness and Effectiveness Survey were shared with them through Facebook wall posts and Google Drive. The quantitative and qualitative analyses of their responses are examined and the results are analyzed based on the sociocultural perspective. This study implied that Facebook can be employed as a motivating technology to engage learners and an effective tool besides the other online medium used during the global lockdown.