Usefulness of Facebook for students: analysis of university profile differences from a multidimensional perspective

ENThe change of paradigm from learner-centered to social learning requires considering various activities such as active participation, information and content sharing, collaboration, and debate. The use of social networking websites takes a lot of time from the students’ university life thus challenging the educators to look for modalities to identify and exploit their educational potential. The increasing popularity of Facebook among university students is raising several research questions regarding its usefulness for education. Therefore, a systematic study on Facebook use by university students has been started in 2014 in the framework of cooperation between researchers from ICI Bucharest (Romania) and Siauliai University (Lithuania). The aim of this research is twofold: (a) to measure the usefulness of Facebook for university students along three dimensions: social usefulness, information usefulness and collaboration usefulness, and (b) to analyze group differences from a multidimensional perspective. A multidimensional model for the perceived usefulness has been conceptualized and empirically validated on two samples using structural equation modelling. A Multi-Group Confirmatory Factor Analysis (MGCFA) provides evidence for configural and metric invariance of the evaluation instrument, thus enabling comparison at construct level. The university profile comparison shows mean differences as regards the global factor and two of its dimensions: social usefulness and information usefulness. The results of this work have several implications for researchers and practitioners. First, it contributes to a better understanding of the educational potential of Facebook. Second, it contributes to a reliable evaluation instrument that performs well across the two groups. Third, the multidimensional perspective enables analyzes on two levels (global factor and each dimension).