Abstract: WhatsApp is a widely used social media app, growing in popularity across the Middle East, and the most popular in Saudi Arabia. In this paper, we investigate the usage of WhatsApp as an educational support tool in a Saudi university. An online survey was constructed to ascertain how students and staff feel about and utilize WhatsApp as part of their daily studies. It also aimed to gather their thoughts on other platforms offered by the university such as Blackboard and email. The survey was tested and the results analyzed for frequency distributions, mean score, and standard deviation. Our results from nearly 200 student and staff members reveals that WhatsApp is heavily utilized for a variety of educational support tasks and greatly preferred over the other platforms. We propose that WhatsApp has good potential to support not only student coordination, information dissemination and simple enquiries but also to support formal teaching and out-of-class learning.

Ahmad J Reeves, Salem Alkhalaf and Mohamed A. Amasha, “WhatsApp as an Educational Support Tool in a Saudi University” International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications(IJACSA), 10(8), 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2019.0100853

@article{Reeves2019,
title = {WhatsApp as an Educational Support Tool in a Saudi University},
journal = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
doi = {10.14569/IJACSA.2019.0100853},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2019.0100853},
year = {2019},
publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
volume = {10},
number = {8},
author = {Ahmad J Reeves and Salem Alkhalaf and Mohamed A. Amasha}
}