Page 129 - Buletin JSKM 2021

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Telegram Vs WhatsApp’s Basic Features and Learning Prospective
Syarifah Adilah Mohamed Yusoff, Naemah Wahab, Elly Johana Johan & Rozita Kadar

C
hatting Online Application or also known as Mobile Messenger
Apps is a new era of messaging platform that score as the widest
and interactive interpersonal communication gadget either one-to-
one, one-to-many or many-to-many users. The best part of this technology
is the available features such as text, voice, image, animation, sound and
sharing files are well integrated and easy to be used for all level of users
from child, teenage, adult and old folks. There are several free chatting
messenger applications available to be downloaded from internet.
According to Statista (2021) two billion users were accessing the
WhatsApp messenger on monthly basis, followed by Facebook
Messenger, WeChat, QQ, Telegram and Snapchat consecutively.
WhatsApp
Early 2020, the pandemic of COVID-19 has caused all countries
worldwide ran MCO (Movement Control Order) to restrict movement
among people and avoid the spread of the disease. Alongside business
sectors that poorly effected, learning institutions instantly have to change
from the normal ways of learning which is face-to-face to online distance
learning (ODL). The learning concept itself suddenly change from too
much rely on lecturer to almost self-learning and isolated at the student’s
hometown. Internet access has been the major issues in implementing
sophisticated collaborative learning software that stands on heavy
bandwidth for seamless accessibility. Hence, students’ that having rural Telegram
hometown face a lot of trouble to access internet signal especially for
synchronous learning. Hence, implementing learning using Mobile Messenger App promotes
high immediacy yet low bandwidth with active and interactive mode of teaching and learning.
Apparently, Mobile Messaging Apps features are convenient and utilised not only for
personnel group chat but also for teaching and learning in online mode. Malaysia is one of the
countries that has high user of WhatsApp and Telegram as chatting messenger application.
There are many features to be compared, but focusing on group chatting for learning Table 1
has summarized valuable comparison for both Telegram and WhatsApp (Mugerwa,2019) and
(Telegram VS Signal, With WhatsApp Comparison Table, 2021) focusing to educational and
creative features.

Table 1: Comparison of group chatting features between WhatsApp and Telegram

Features Telegram WhatsApp
Group members 200,000 256

Group smart notifications YES NO

Cloud sync YES YES, requires active

File sending (in any format) Up to 1.5GB Up to 100MB

Edit sent message YES up to 48 NO
hours
Web/Desktop version YES YES, requires active
internet on phone