COETAIL: LINE Messaging App

Another post toward obtaining my Certificate in Educational Technology and Information Literacy (COETAIL)

This fall a colleague shared that he'd used the LINE messaging app during the major JALT conference to communicate with other conference organizers. Soon afterward, on my train commutes in Kanagawa and Tokyo, I realized I was seeing more and more commuter smartphones opened to LINE. Next, my university students working on a group project revealed that they were communicating with their group members using LINE. So I downloaded the app myself, noted that a number of my contacts were already using it, and began inquiring of friends: are you using LINE? At a glance, it seemed to me that those who were interacting with Japanese speakers were far more likely to be using LINE.

I decided to survey my students--at a public university in Japan.

Since I wanted to make sure all students responded, I handed out paper copies of the survey to students in five of my six classes. There were 61 respondents.

Here is the survey:
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Below are some of the results. Click to see the full results:

Partial results of Social Media Survey re. Messaging App LINE
Of 61 student respondents, 58 use LINE. Most students use LINE as well as Facebook, and many use Twitter.

As this survey indicates, LINE is hugely popular in Japan, and also big in Thailand and Taiwan. See this recent Forbes article about the LINE success story.

For teachers it's always important for us to know the tools that students are using, and to consider ways in which such tools might be relevant to our classes. Certainly, for collaborative projects requiring work outside class time, LINE seems to be meaningful, as students commented that group communication is especially easy with LINE.

So, are you using LINE?