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An Empirical Investigation of Students’ Attitudes Towards the Use of Social Media in Omani Higher Education

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Book cover Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Systems and Informatics 2019 (AISI 2019)

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 1058))

Abstract

Although social media usage in higher education has been frequently examined, little is known regarding the differences in students’ attitudes towards its use in the Omani higher education. Therefore, this study provides an opportunity to advance the understanding of these differences in attitudes by focusing on three different attributes, namely age, gender, and social media application. A total of 169 students enrolled at Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat, Oman took part in the study by the medium of an online survey. The empirical data analysis triggered out that there was a significant difference in attitudes with regard to age groups, in which students aged between 18 and 22 years old are much interested in using social media than the others. Nevertheless, the findings also showed that there was no significant difference in attitudes with respect to social media application and gender. More interesting, the outcomes pointed out that WhatsApp is the most frequent application used by students for educational purposes.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Art, Computing and Creative Industry, Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris, Tanjung Malim, Malaysia

    Noor Al-Qaysi & Norhisham Mohamad-Nordin

  2. College of Economics, Management and Information Systems, University of Nizwa, Nizwa, Oman

    Norhisham Mohamad-Nordin

  3. Applied Computational Civil and Structural Engineering Research Group, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

    Mostafa Al-Emran

Authors
  1. Noor Al-Qaysi
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  2. Norhisham Mohamad-Nordin
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  3. Mostafa Al-Emran
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Noor Al-Qaysi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Cairo University, Giza, Egypt

    Aboul Ella Hassanien

  2. The British University in Dubai, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

    Khaled Shaalan

  3. Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt

    Mohamed Fahmy Tolba

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Al-Qaysi, N., Mohamad-Nordin, N., Al-Emran, M. (2020). An Empirical Investigation of Students’ Attitudes Towards the Use of Social Media in Omani Higher Education. In: Hassanien, A., Shaalan, K., Tolba, M. (eds) Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Systems and Informatics 2019. AISI 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1058. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31129-2_32

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