Social media offers platform for online learning – Study

Results from a recent academic study confirm that proper usage of social media could promote a new era of social learning, social presence and an alternative platform to foster online learning in developing countries.

The study, “Responses to COVID-19 in higher education: Social media usage for sustaining formal academic communication in developing countries”, published in Sustainability on 12 August, show that social media platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp have been used effectively to sustain formal teaching and learning in Egyptian public higher education institutions which lacked technological platforms and formal online learning management systems during the COVID-19 shutdown.

The study reveals that most faculty members used Facebook or WhatsApp as the sole tool for academic communication with their students because online meeting platforms such as Google Classroom and Zoom were unfamiliar to students and no training was available.

For students, Facebook was the most adopted tool for formal academic communication, followed by WhatsApp (69.4%), YouTube (63.1%), Wikis (50.2%) and other social media (19.4%), for example, blogs and Twitter. A low proportion of students used LinkedIn for academic communication (6.5%).

The study, conducted by Abu Elnasr E Sobaih, Ahmed M Hasanein and Ahmed E Abu Elnasr, focused on nine public higher education institutions in Egypt, offering tourism and hotel bachelor degrees and representing 597 full-time faculty members and about 12,000 undergraduate students.

Online community

The results showed that in addition to sustaining formal teaching and learning, students used social media to build an online community and support each other, whereas faculty members were focused on teaching and learning.

The results of the study confirm that proper usage of social media can promote a new era of social learning, social presence and an alternative platform to foster online learning.

“The policy-makers in public higher education in many developing countries have had a quick and good response to the COVID-19 pandemic by adopting a new culture of online learning using free online platforms and social media. However, they have to be proactive and develop an appropriate policy that fosters sustainable online learning,” the study states.

The authors call on higher education policy-makers, especially in developing countries, to promote social media usage for formal academic communication, and call for greater collaboration with the telecommunication sector to ensure the provision of appropriate internet services for faculty members and students to support their online learning.

IT units

The study also suggests that higher education institutions need to establish information technology (IT) units for guidance, technical support and training to ensure appropriate use of social media and other online platforms.

“Special support and attention have to be given for freshmen who are new at university and to the online learning experience,” the study notes.

Samir Khalaf Abd-El-Aal, a higher education and scientific research expert at the National Research Centre in Cairo, welcomed the research on social media for formal academic communications especially in resource-constrained settings.

However, he warned that internet costs and accessibility issues needed to be resolved, and more research was needed.

“More in-depth studies on using social media for formal learning purposes in several African higher education settings under controlled evaluations and at different scales, as well as assessment of learning outcomes along with measures for ensuring its education quality, need to be conducted,” Abd-El-Aal said.

Paul Prinsloo, research professor in open distance learning in the department of business management at the University of South Africa (UNISA), told University World News that COVID-19 disruptions to teaching and learning, development cycles, administrative processes and support networks encouraged students and university staff to “self-organise” using WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter.

Dissemination of crucial information

“These media provided crucial contact at a time when university staff and students felt isolated, and in instances where official communication often broke down, these networks disseminated crucial information,” Prinsloo said.

However, he said while there is evidence that social media can be used to “push” information to students, there were “limitations and institutional restrictions”.

“With reference to the issue of scale, many of UNISA’s courses have more than 8,000 students per course. Imagine for one moment what such a WhatsApp group might look like?”

He said there were also concerns about the “quality and veracity” of information shared informally on networks.

“In my opinion the use of social media enriches and diversifies information ecologies as well as playing a supportive role for formal learning networks, far beyond learning management systems,” he said.