مرکز منطقه ای اطلاع رساني علوم و فناوري - Use of Social Media in Learning and Teaching Process

Abstract :

Blogger and Facebook as social media environments are two important platforms, because of their popularity, easy to use graphical user interface and free opportunities. The increasing number of research in the literature and the usage of social networking sides for supporting the learning process show that understanding the reflection of learners and investigating the result of a sample of a case are the keys. This 14 weeks study focused on understanding the students’ perspective on teaching and learning by supporting social media. This single case study was implemented on the 18 Doctoral students at Ege University, College of Education during the Fall Semester in 2012-2013. Participants were 10 male, 8 female students from various institutions. The data was collected online by using pre and post questionnaires. Descriptive content analysis was conducted; themes and codes were created by the combination of literature, the aim of the research and the collected data of this study. The results of this study showed that there were four main themes such as social networking, affective dimension, active learners, and instructor’s characteristics. The results highlighted that all students met their expectations during the course and they had positive attitude towards using Facebook. However, only the half of students thought that Blogger is an useful tool for the course activities. The results are overlapping with literature; however it should be emphasized that it needs more research on how to design the instruction by using social media.