The Role of Social Media for Collaborative Learning to Improve Academic Performance of Students and Researchers Al-Rahmi, Othman, and Yusuf This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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analysis was gathered through a survey questionnaire distributed to 741 postgraduate students in
the 2013/2014 academic session to obtain information about their experiences and the impact of
using social media on collaborative learning through constructivism theory. The present study
uses a five-point Likert scales for measuring all variables, from 1-5: (1) Strongly disagree, (2)
Disagree, (3) Undecided, (4) Agree, (5) Strongly Agree. The selection and construction of a
measurement scale requires the consideration of several factors that influence the reliability,
validity, and practicality of the scale (Cooper & Schindler, 2006).The respondents were required
to offer information of their experiences in using social media tools for collaborative learning and
engagement to improve their performance. From the distributed questionnaires within three-
month duration, questionnaires were found 18 incomplete, thus, 723 valid responses were
returned. The IBM SPSS (Version-20) and Amos (Version-16) were used to analyze the data.
Sample Two types of sampling techniques are cited in literature namely random sampling and non-
random sampling. Sampling is described as a statistical procedure involving the selection of
subset of individual observations from a population, intending to generate an effective knowledge
concerning the students in Malaysian higher institutions. The first type is selected for the present
study as it offers the target population equal chances to be selected. Therefore, the sample
comprised of randomly selected postgraduate students who belong to five research universities in
Malaysia namely UM, UKM, USM, UTM and UPM. According to Krejcie and Morgan (1970)
sampling table, the number of respondents was gauged to be seven hundred and twenty-three
(723).
