Influence of Media Richness on Undergraduate Students Learning Through and Acceptance of Social Media

Abstract

This study employed quasi-experimental design to examine the influence of media richness on learning through and user acceptance of social media applications as learning tools. The quasi-experiment, which consisted of three stages and took place over an eight-week period, was carried out with 100 undergraduate students who were assigned to two experimental groups (Facebook-based learning condition and Blogger-based learning condition) and a control group (paper-based learning condition). Anchored on Media Richness Theory by Daft and Lengel (1984), the study determined the differences among the three learning conditions in terms of learning performance, perceived learning performance, perceived learning satisfaction, perceived usefulness, and perceived ease of use. The descriptive statistics results showed that the participants assigned to Blogger-based learning tasks obtained higher pretest and posttest mean scores than Facebook and paper-based group participants. Facebook-based group participants had higher positive ratings of perceived learning performance and perceived learning satisfaction than the two groups. They also reported higher positive ratings of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use, making Facebook as a more acceptable learning tool than Blogger-based and paper-based learning platforms.