The Use of Social Media for Academic Purposes in Student’ Learning Process

Abstract

Social media has a great impact on student’s lives. They spend a considerable part of their time on these pages. Social media includes social networking sites (SNSs), virtual gaming sites, video sites, projects sites and blogs. Millions of students are using these Web 2.0 tools worldwide, there hasn’t been much research regarding the educational use of social networking. The purpose of this study is to investigate attitudes toward the use of social media in learning process. The findings suggest that social media and social network sites in particular can be very useful as an educational tool. Students using SNSs as a supplement to their curriculum showed that they loved spending time on SNSs, and exercises, videos and other sharing in group are useful for their academic purposes. The paper concludes with suggestions for improving academic purpose and it highlights the fact that every educator must regard how their current teaching standard can be improved or how they could perhaps be replaced because of a prevalent web.

DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2015.v4n2p393