Click, Watch, Learn: Motivational Drivers of YouTube Usage among Economics Students

Over the last few years, online learning has witnessed a marked increase, partly due to technological advances and the rising demand for flexible learning.With a lot of online learning platforms emerging to help institutions manage their teaching and learning activities, such as Learning Management Systems (LMS), Student Information Systems (SIS), Massive Open Online Systems (MOOC), and others.While this type of e-learning platform emphasises private and personal use, YouTube emerged in 2005 as a public video-sharing platform.YouTube can be very resourceful to students, with its large collection of educational materials on various subjects.Its easy accessibility, visual presentation, and interactive elements help improve students' comprehension and engagement.Making it is one of the convenient tools to be used by educators that offer them a platform to post their teaching videos over the internet.This study was conducted to examine which factors trigger students to use YouTube the most in assisting their study, including perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, flexibility, social Influence, and content diversity.One hundred seventeen economists were involved in this study.The results indicate that perceived ease of use, along with social influence and content diversity, significantly motivate economics students at the institution to utilise YouTube for their academic needs over other factors tested.