Facebook and the others. Potentials and obstacles of Social Media for teaching in higher education

By Stefania Manca, Maria Ranieri. Comput. Educ., 2016

469 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Social Media tools are seen by many authors as powerful drivers of change for teaching and learning practices, in terms of openness, interactivity and sociability. However, extensive surveys about actual use that are carried out with large samples at a national level are rare. This study reports the results of a survey addressed to the Italian academic staff, with the aim of identifying the uses of Social Media in the field of university teaching practices. The response rate was 10.5%, corresponding to 6139. The respondents were asked to identify frequency of use, motivations, teaching practices and obstacles related to the use of a number of tools: generic social network sites (Twitter, Facebook), professional and academic networking services (LinkedIn, ResearchGate and Academia.edu), tools to write and comment (blogs, wikis) and to archive and retrieve content material for lectures and group work (podcasts, YouTube and Vimeo, SlideShare). Analyses of data tested which socio-demographic variables mostly affected frequency of use, and the relationships between motivations, ways of use, barriers to use and the scientific discipline. The results show that Social Media use is still rather limited and restricted and that academics are not much inclined to integrate these devices into their practices for several reasons, such as cultural resistance, pedagogical issues or institutional constraints. However, there are differences among academics in the ways they use Social Media or perceive them, mostly depending on the scientific discipline of teaching. Overall, the results emphasise ambivalent attitudes towards the benefits and challenges of Social Media in the context of higher education with obstacles prevailing over advantages. We examine the frequency of use of Social Media for teaching purposes.The variable most associated with frequency of use is scientific discipline.We present motivations and ways to use Social Media tools in teaching.A principal component analysis reveals three main factors as obstacles to use.Results show a complex scenario where potentials and barriers are intertwined.

Subfields: Communication, Information Systems, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/25d8df83fede2eb5077b34d63da216d92485faab

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Citations in the corpus

Multimedia tools in the teaching and learning processes: A systematic review (2020, background): “, 2012), secondary school students (Akinoso, 2018; Maaruf and Siraj, 2013); one involved interviewing the Professors (Chen and Xia, 2012), another involved 4–10 year olds (Manca and Ranieri, 2016) and a sample of 272 students whose ages were not specified (Ocepek et al.”
The impact of perceived enjoyment, perceived reciprocal benefits and knowledge power on students' knowledge sharing through Facebook (2017, background): “…challenges related to incorporating social network into teaching and learning practice and cultural and social factors, such as the erosion of teachers' traditional roles and themanagement of relationship with students limiting teaching use of social media (Manca & Ranieri, 2015, 2016).”
Social Media Use in Higher Education: A Review (2018, background): “However, all the above findings conflict with the results of some other studies [34,42], in which the positive effect of OSN platforms in educational processes is in question.”
Motivations to seek science videos on YouTube: free-choice learning in a connected society (2018, background): “A 2013 survey of more than 6,000 university educators in Italy showed that, among several social media platforms they used for teaching, video sharing sites were used most frequently (Manca & Ranieri, 2016).”