E-Learning through social media in the virtual learning environment

Blended learning has become effective learning mode that adopted by well known universities around the world. Blended learning refers to combining traditional classroom learning with e-learning with the aims to enrich entire learning process. From the last decade, we have seen the strong growth of millenials students in Indonesian higher education institutions. They developed high familiarity with Internet technology, social media and smartphone uses. The needs of adopting social media into blended learning has become essential part in blended learning mode nowadays. For this reason, the article takes a popular method, Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) enables to enrich the entire e-learning environment. We apply the VLE dashboard with adopting the Web-based Synchronized Multimedia Lecture (WSML) framework that enables to provide authoring tool to record the temporal and spatial relationships among media involved and facilitate synchronize presentation across media access. This framework has advantages to promote the real-time collaboration amongst students and teacher(s), like in a classroom setting, but with online mode. VLE takes advantages of web 2.0 and social media technology that enables to conduct real time meeting with video conference and easy exchange multimedia files. The outcome of the article is expected to provide social media learning based system that can be apply in higher education institutions to avoid boredom in traditional blended learning.