Social Media for Academics: Motivation Killer or Booster?

In this paper, we present a study of exploring academics´ current practices and perceptions towards social media, and its potential educational use in higher education. With the growing popularity of social media, many studies have focused on the needs, motivation, opinions and experiences of the students. However further research is needed to investigate the social media adoption in education from educators´ standpoint. The study investigates current tendencies, beliefs and opinions of the academics as regards to social media from emotional and motivational perspectives in a threefold, personal, professional and educational. An extensive questionnaire was developed and administrated to faculty members. Our research is motivated by the idea of the utmost importance of determining the academics´ perceptions of social media in order to form the foundation on which strategies about how to best utilize it in higher education can be shaped. The range of perceptions evidenced from the participants are essential to context-based understanding of its potential and shed light on problems and issues that need to be tackled for potential use of social media in education.