As social media becomes more popular, more and more people become more interested in it. Students need socialization, so they are hesitant to take online courses or their daily schedules make it easier to take online classes.  Privacy is a concern in regards to social dimension of students. A study conducted addressed questions such as:  Does social media and social learning promote educational opportunities for better student understanding? Do students view social media as an asset to courses, enhance understanding and keep students engaged?  What problems do university students see with social media usage?

Thirty four questions were incorporated into an online survey regarding demographics of 1376 university students between ages 18-50 and over as the sample. 32% are male, 68% are female, 79% full time and 21% part time students, 21% live on campus and 79% live off campus.  The procedure in the research consisted of an 18 question online survey analyzed and disbursed to 8,486 students. The students had one month to complete the survey and only 16% replied.  Perhaps maybe a face to face survey or a classroom survey may have gotten them a bigger return on replies. I know when I get online survey request I tend to ignore them. In peoples busy lives they don’t have the time to look at what may be considered “junk” online. Maybe also since the research being done is in regards to social media, perhaps putting an online chat for discussion on the college website to seek feedback from the diverse student body.

Analysis consisted of percentages, t tests, and correlations.  Overall results indicated that students were positive regarding the use of social media learning in courses online.  It also resulted in implications for teaching improvements with distance learning. It is believed that learners interact with each other and improves learning with social media.

A problem university students consider with social media use is that it depends on the person, gender, full time, part time, on or off campus students. At this time social media is not used a whole lot, but results indicate professors should train to achieve comfort with social media in their classroom.

 

http://www.macrothink.org/journal/index.php/jsr/article/view/2136/1779