Using a Facebook closed-group as part of an online course

Daniyar Sapargaliyev
Eurasian National University
Kazakhstan

This paper presents the results of a survey among international students after using a Facebook closed-group as part of an online course. We posted educational materials of one session from the online course: “Developing teachers’ critical thinking through educational designing” on Facebook and integrated it with the educational platform Moodle. The students studied the course materials in six sessions during the semester. We specifically created a Facebook closed-group to offer students the option to use not only PCs, but also mobile devices to access the online course. After completing of the course, we asked the students (n = 10) to evaluate the use of Facebook in learning. The findings showed that students indicate imperfections in the organization of course materials on Facebook. Nevertheless, the majority of students noted the positive role of Facebook in the development of relationships between each other.