Students' engagement in YouTube for e- learning during covid-19: a study based on Islamic and Arabic students of south eastern university of Sri Lanka

Abstract

Information and Communication Technology dominating all the sectors to provide better services to the relevant organization. In that sense, social media from web 2.0 not only provide connections between the world, but also creating better service to education in terms of e-learning. Therefore, this case study analyzed the students' engagement in YouTube for Elearning from the selected years of students from Islamic studies and Arabic language of the South Eastern University of Sri Lanka. In this regard, a clustered sampling was used to select the sample, and YouTube's inbuilt tool called YouTube analytics was used to analyze the data collected through uploaded videos. Where those videos uploaded in different qualities, different duration, and different types of videos. It was found that short timing videos were expected by the students rather than long time videos and not only subject-related videos but also revision or answer methods videos; furthermore, this paper confirmed that students who enrolled for the practical-free subject can learn easily in the e-learning process. Errors in the number of views due to the subscribers and less number of the available number of related research papers were the main limitations. It is suggested to motivate students to use downloaded videos rather than watch online to reduce the data usage; further, conduct further studies to find the most suitable social media for the e-learning purpose and any comparative analysis between practical related subjects and practical-free subjects for students' engrossment towards social media. This case study mainly focused on students' engrossment towards YouTube in e-learning will help to the development of e-learning platform through social media.