University Students’ Attitudes toward the Formal Integration of Facebook in their Education: Investigation Guided by Rogers' Attributes of Innovation

Abstract

The aim of the study was to examine students’ attitudes toward the formal integration of Facebook in their education at Al- Hussein Bin Talal University and to examine the relationship between their attitudes and their perceptions of Facebook’s attributes. The investigation was guided by Rogers' (2003) attributes of innovation. A descriptive method was adopted in which a questionnaire was used to collect data from 99 undergraduate university students from the college of education. The results show that the students have positive and high attitudes toward the formal integration of Facebook in their teaching. In addition, the students have positive perceptions of Facebook in terms of its relative advantage, ease of use, compatibility, trialability, and observability. Furthermore, Regression analysis showed that 46% of the variance of the students’ attitudes toward the formal integration of Facebook in their education can be accounted for by its linear relationship with the five independent variables: relative advantage, ease of use, compatibility, trialability, and observability. Based on the results, set of recommendations were provided.