Investigating Students’ Choice for Online Communication Tools in Flipped Classroom

Abstract

Providing learners with an effective communication tool for online interactions with teachers is especially important for the flipped classroom approach which supports students cognitively and affectively outside a physical classroom. In this paper we conducted a survey on 203 Taiwanese students in order to examine two the most popular online social media sites and messengers from students’ perspective. We found a pattern between preferred students’ online self-disclosure level and preferred way of online communication with teacher. Students who tend to share less personal information prefer to use more private tools, such as messengers, and those who are open in online space tend to choose social media for communication with instructors. We also found that students with high level of online self-disclosure prefer their teachers to show the same openness. These findings suggest that cultures along with different online behaviors may require different online communication tools for the flipped classroom approach.