The past decade has seen an unprecedented growth in social media usage. The social media effect has spread across all avenues of daily life. This post seeks to explore what has become of the interaction between social media and higher education. It particularly shines the spotlight on the usage of social media by faculty.
An important departure point in this pursuit would be a centralized definition of social media. Be that as it may, such a definition is hard to find owing to the very fluid nature of social media. In broad terms, the essence of social media beings in it being a technological system that facilitates collaboration and community. Guided by this characterization, social media can be said to include social networking sites such as Facebook, Linked In, Twitter and others. It can also include blogs, wikis and virtual gaming environments.
As social media takes hold, some quarters of the academia have sought to provide pedagogical and philosophical justification for its use in higher education. It has been argued that the nature of the modern student who comes to the university with a very developed social media footprint must be considered as a factor to motivate the usage of social media in higher education, presumably, as a way to provide familiarity and thus facilitate a smooth transition for the learner. Others have argued that the usage of social media in higher education is in keeping with the theory of social constructivism, in so far as the former encourages learning as a conversational process where dialogue is primal. It has also been argued that social media fosters the development of a connectedness that can be equated to the ideals of the theory of situated learning where context and environment are important considerations.
Members of faculty are widely aware of the existence of social media. In a study supported by Pearson education, it is reported that about 80% of faculty, regardless of age and years of experience, are aware of the existence of social media. The study also reports a wide usage of the same by faculty. The usage is conveniently split into three categories namely; personal, professional and teaching.
The study reports of a high general personal usage, pegging it at about 75%. However, only about 50% of the faculty are reported to actively engage in social media activity. This seems to be determined by the level of experience, with the active usage being characteristic of newer less experienced faculty.
About 80% of faculty are reported to use of social media for their professional career purposes, albeit the usage not being very frequent. This usage is reported to be more than the same in regular non-higher education work places, contrary to widely held speculation.
Over 75% of Faculty are reported to use social media for teaching purposes including direct usage in class and posting content for students to view outside class, communication, course management, data repository, and as a platform for sharing viewpoints.
Despite the positive light about the usage of social media in higher education, there are a number of limitations that come to the fore. In the absence of adequate research on the impact of social media on students’ achievement, attempts to attribute improved performance have been discredited as being incidental and likened to the ‘grocery truck’ analogy, where the delivery truck is credited for the achievement. It has also been posited that the usage of social media for the only reason that it is available might be inappropriate seeing that this was not developed specifically for higher education usage. Others have also noted the time consumption, privacy intrusion and copyright infringement issues that usage of social media presents as being problematic.
Sources:
Tess, P.A. (2013) The role of social media in higher education classes (real and virtual) – A literature review, Computers in Human Behavior
Moran, M. Seaman, J. Tinti-Kane, H. (2011) The role of social media in higher education classes (real and virtual) – A literature review, Pearson Learning Solutions and Babson Survey Research Group
AMOS KALUA 
Thank you Amos for your informative blog. I especially liked your emphasis on the definition of social media and how it can contribute to social construction of knowledge. The numbers and percentages are so interesting, i am curious to know how these trends would differ between undergraduate courses vs. graduate ones; my guess is the former have higher usage of social media in their curricula.
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Many thanks Neda for the feedback. Your curiosity brings up a very interesting dimension. Much as the sources that I found did not provide the comparative statistics on usage at undergraduate and graduate levels, I would also suspect the usage to be higher in the former. Among the many possible reasons could be that younger learners, who dominate enrollment at undergraduate level, seem to be the more avid users of social media than graduate students.
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