Attitudes and Preferences of Students in Sports Science Concerning the Use of E-Learning and Social Media at the University of Novi Sad

Using e-learning and social media has become a common part of students’ academic lives in many sciences, including sport sciences. The purpose of this research study was to identify attitudes and preferences of students in sports science concerning the use of e-learning and social media at the University of Novi Sad. The present study was included respondents (N=297) from the Faculty of Sport and Physical Education at the University of Novi Sad from all levels of studies. The attitudes and preferences of the use of e-learning and social media were measured with three separate parts: (1) General information (8 items); (2) use of different genres of social media in teaching (28 items); (3) e-learning in the field of sports studies (13 items), and descriptive statistics (frequencies) were used to describe the basic features of the data. The results showed that participants mostly use Facebook (44.4% of students), Viber (66%), and WhatsApp (56.6%) to contact peer students for study in the context of learning purposes. In comparison, they do not use LinkedIn (1.3%), Twitter (0.3%) or Skype (4%). From another side, the students mostly share their messages via Viber and WhatsApp in the form of various questions (67% via Viber; 62.6% via WhatsApp), video messages (20.5%; 25.3%), screenshots of their screen (21.2%; 27.6%), various links (23.2%; 25.3%), comments on a current topic (22.2%; 22.2%). In the participants’ opinion (81.5%), the teaching process has been set back by the coronavirus pandemic. In contrast, the students experienced the pandemic’s positive effect as an improvement in e-learning (51.2% of students). They shared the opinion that virtual teaching is not as effective as traditional teaching (85.2%). The theoretical and practical applications of these results are discussed.