Students’ Insights on Learning Mathematics via the WhatsApp Social Network
摘要
The “WhatsApp Bagroup Project” is a unique country-wide project in Israel to assist students preparing for their mathematics matriculation examination (bagrut in Hebrew). About 40 WhatsApp groups were created during which teachers integrated blended learning, and students presented questions or difficult problems. The unique feature of the Bagroup is that the teacher and students in each group of 100 individuals had not previously met. In this chapter, we report on what students believe are the pros and cons of Bagroup. We used systematic content analysis to categorize their responses to four open-ended questions into meaningful themes and quantified the percentage of students who mentioned each theme. According to the students, the main advantages of the WhatsApp platform are its high (24/7) availability, immediate and continuous support, ease of access to materials and content, and mutual aid. The students also pointed out the platform’s disadvantages: an overwhelming one-dimensional thread of messages that hinders discussion and problem resolution, lack of face-to-face communication, unsuitable timing and pacing of lessons, and limited effectiveness in managing learning. Thus, while WhatsApp offers substantial opportunities for pedagogical innovation, it also requires strategies to ensure structured communication and efficient group management.