WhatsApp with Learning Preferences? Imelda Smit Information Technology Department North-West University (Vaal Triangle Campus) Vanderbijlpark, SOUTH AFRICA imelda.smit@nwu.ac.za Abstract—Systems Analysis and Design is a second year subject offered as two modules. It forms part of the Information Technology course at the North-West University’s Vaal Triangle Campus. As part of an initiative to create varied opportunities for students to learn, the lecturer creates instant messaging groups on WhatsApp; a forum created to allow communication between peers. It is designed to allow students not having access to Internet away from campus, access to peers while preparing for formative and summative assessment. Felder and Silverman developed five dimensions of learning preferences, each with two sections. Their research built on the research of Kolb, Meyers-Briggs and Jung. The dimensions include: perception where learning takes place in an intuitive way or by sensing; input which may be visual or verbal; organizing which may be inductive or deductive; processing where students learn through active participation or on their own through reflection; and understanding in a sequential or global way. The WhatsApp environment was included in students learning repertoire to allow for differences in learning preferences and to enable students to get answers to questions while away from campus. With WhatsApp being a social media platform, we may assume that students who learn actively will be more inclined to use it. Since text is used to communicate, we may suspect that verbal learners will also benefit. Pictures can be sent, which may assist visual learners. In this way, it may be argued that most learning preferences can be addressed in a conversation group. Are these assumptions true? Does instant messaging address most learning preferences? This paper will attempt to identify students from the different learning preferences by analyzing the WhatsApp conversations among them. Other questions that will be answered from this research include: How good is student participation – how many students prefer not to be part of a conversation group for learning, and how many would stay, but only to read conversations between peers? Keywords— learning preferences, WhatsApp groups, Systems Analysis and Design I. INTRODUCTION AND CONTEXT Systems Analysis and Design (SA&D) is offered as a second year subject in the Information Technology course offered at the Vaal Triangle Campus (VTC) of the North-West University (NWU). It is offered over a year as two modules. Students are diverse; black, white, Indian, colored, foreigners; male and female make up the classes that grew from 50 students in 2011 to 125 in 2014. Many students are from disadvantaged backgrounds, magnifying the importance of using resources to its full capacity. Students find the subject difficult for various reasons, including the fact that the subject is not as structured as mathematics and programming (in which they normally excel), but fuzzy; it includes a lot of material to be made sense of and the lecturer expects them to work in groups while it is the first time they are exposed to closely working with and relying on their peers. To help all students to participate to their full capacity, many resources are utilized and made available to students. These include eFundi, a Learning Management System (LMS) with all resources and information uploaded in one place. Since 2014 study guides were replaced by SmartGuides, which are downloadable to any device and are used to guide students through every study unit. Videos on difficult concepts support the text book. Various formative assessment opportunities exist to create formative feedback opportunities and allow students to build a solid participation mark. A group project teaches students to work in groups to support one another and learn from one another. Since students consistently find the preparation for semester tests the most difficult and stressful activity, the compilation of instant messaging (IM) groups were introduced to allow students to communicate with one another and get feedback from peers or the lecturer – immediately. When the initiative was introduced, Blackberry Messenger (BBM), MXiT (a South African development) and WhatsApp were used to ensure that all students have access, but since the middle of 2013 only WhatsApp is used, since most students have access to it. It was found that group sizes should be fairly big to ensure active communication on a variety of topics. Here the developments in IM implementations assisted its use for our purpose – when the project started in 2012, the three IM applications used (BBM, MXiT, WhatsApp) allowed between 15 and 25 people per group, this was extended with subsequent upgrades of WhatsApp to 50 in 2013 and 100 in 2015. Bigger groups generate lots of communication, streamed 24/7 as students work on different schedules. This did create problems for some students who left the groups when the discussions got momentum. Since the early days some time is taken to make group members aware that posts need to be made with care and that one may silence a conversation while focusing on studies or sleeping – current applications allows it. In the subsequent sections the following topics will be addressed, namely the formulation of the problem, a background on learning preferences, a discussion of the research project, the learning preferences identified from the WhatsApp conversations and finally, the concluding remarks. 978-1-4799-8454-1/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE 2015 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 2101