CHAPTER 1

THE PROBLEM AND ITS BACKGROUND

Background of the Study

Technology introduces up a new space for learning where students are

allowed more freedom, and teachers are guides in an exciting new world of

almost infinite knowledge. Without effective collaboration between learners and

teachers, students often lose motivation due to the perceived lack of community

and sense of shared learning. This is why it is critical to use various forms of

online interaction, from text messages and video conferencing to collaborative

interactive projects and the latest online platforms, to support students and keep

them engaged (Gorenko, n.d.). Another benefit of technology in learning is that

students often learn in a faster rate because they are not only listening to the

teacher and reading textbooks but also participating in engaging academic

activity. That’s why it became a great way to encourage learning using short

quizzes, exercises with elements of gamification from the social medias,

interactive apps, and more. With information easily accessible on the internet,

the teacher’s role as the subject expert becomes less complex and critical. It’s

the ability to guide students through these volumes of information that really

matters in modern education. At the same time, finding the most effective ways

of learning from different sources together with students makes teachers co-
learners rather than the sole source of knowledge. And this is exactly the

behavior that can inspire students and encourage them to study beyond the

curriculum. It might look like teachers are losing control, but in fact, technology

is the new approach to build real trust and respect within the class (Gorenko,

n.d.).

The use of social media in education provides students with the ability to

get more useful information, to connect with learning groups and other

educational systems that make education convenient. Hopkins (2017) said that

social media is no doubt can increase student collaboration. Since students

become friends with their classmates on social media and they more likely to

collaborate on activities. This leads to higher recall rates as students become

more connected to their institution and their peers. Social media tools provide

students and institutions with multiple opportunities to improve learning

methods. Through these, you can incorporate social media plugins that enable

sharing and interaction. Students can benefit from online tutorials and resources

that are shared through social medias (“The Role of Social Media”, n.d).

The faculty can also use social media as a method to get students to take

part on activities. There are students who can’t express themselves confidently,

and many may not speak up in a classroom, but that may not be the case on

social media. Students today grew up on social media, and for many, it became

the normal way to interact. Faculty can post questions on social media such as

Twitter, Facebook, or even Tik-tok and students can answer those questions, by
including a specific hashtag in their own posts. This not only allows the faculty to

find the student answers but also allows other students to see what others are

answering and create a dialog. And also, a lot of LMS “learning management

systems” incorporate a discussion board to accomplish this same educational

pedagogy but are just as useful if not more by using a social media platform in

education (Hopkins, 2017).

Social Media are also helpful in team projects. College students emphasize

the importance of the basic skill of working in groups and thus social media sites

can be helpful with that to increase this ability as the students can hold meetings

in real-time and work on their activities simultaneously. This enhances the

likelihood that they will also spend time together working on activities and may

not have to make time to meet in person all the time as the activity progresses.

Having teams work together using social media only strengthens advantage one

and two of your educational activities Hopkins (2017). Evidently there is valuable

knowledge to be gained through social media such as analytics and insights on

various topics or issues for study purposes. Social media is also a medium where

students can establish beneficial connections for their careers. Social media has

the ability to broaden your perspective on various subjects and gives

illuminating, instant content that is new. You have the opportunity of engaging

experts to get answers on topics that you may need help in. Social media offers

audience and subject monitoring tools that are useful and it is one of the best

platforms to extract data. You can find out how the majority people feel about a
particular topic or how experts perceive and advice on specific issues. This can

help students compile and produce useful content for research. Whether

students are working on an assignment, working on a project or trying to gain

more insight on a subject, some of the best information and results can be

extracted from social media. The important benefit that networks build is the

many helpful and beneficial tools and access that make learning become a

pleasant process (“The Role of Social Media”, n.d).

Social media includes a wide range of tools that integrate technology,

social interaction and content creation. In this work, analysis will be confined to

the most popular social media types. These include social media networks, blogs,

micro-blogs, wikis, and media sharing. In what follows, we provide a brief

description of each of these social media types.

A social media network is an online community that put together people

with common passion, point of view, activities and experiences together by

sharing their news, photos, videos, and events. A social network is essentially

composed of a representation of each user (often a profile), his social links as

well as a variety of additional services. These online communities also provide

means for users to interact with each over the internet, such as e-mail and

instant messaging (Faizi et al., 2013). Just like the great part about Facebook is

that everyone is on it. Students love connecting with their friends and family with

Facebook so telling them to check out the page where you post only makes

sense. Students love Instagram for so many reasons but mainly for the photos
and effects available to them. Teachers can create assignments that tap into the

need to Instagram such as photo essays where students take photos, upload,

and add captions or students can even create campaigns for certain

organizations or just for a lesson (Chesser, 2013).

Blogs are web-based logs or journals that enable users to post their

thoughts, ideas, writing, and opinions for other people to view. Blogs are usually

written by one person about a particular topic and are usually updated on a

regular basis with entries displayed in reverse chronological order (Faizi et al.,

2013). Example of this is Blogger which connects teachers to students using

unique themes as well as diary-style writing. With access to teachers’ posted

links, lessons, and thoughts students become more successful and comfortable

with the teacher when learning online. Another is WordPress, it has become a

popular way for teachers to set up a web of communication and lessons with

their students. Chalkboard is an educational theme that prepares students for

learning and helps teachers outline goals and objectives while still providing

great visuals. Teachers can also use it to inspire students to write more by

having them create their own blogs and meet the WordPress Challenges

(Chesser, 2013).

Micro-blogs, as their name suggests, provide a similar function as

traditional blogs, but with a much stronger focus on brevity. A micro-blogging

website enables users to write short text messages and transmit them in real-

time to their contacts. Micro-blogging can, therefore, be seen as a cross between

blogging and social networking. The most famous micro-blogging service is

Twitter (Faizi et al., 2013). The best way to use Twitter for teaching is as a

reminder to students that they need to complete an assignment for a particular

due date or that they have an exam coming up soon so study this or that.

Sometimes teachers even use it for inspiration by sending a famous quote

(Chesser, 2013).

Wikis are websites that are developed collaboratively by a community of

users. They allow any user to add, change, correct and post information for

others to see. The largest and most popular wiki is Wikipedia, a user- contributed

online encyclopedia currently hosting millions of articles in over more than 200

languages (Faizi et al., 2013). Wikis can be used as a source for obtaining

information and knowledge, and also as a method of virtual collaboration, e.g.,

to share dialogue and information among participants in group projects, or to

allow learners to engage in learning with each other, using wikis as a

collaborative environment to construct their knowledge or to be part of a virtual

community of practice (Boulos et al., 2006).

Media sharing sites enable users to upload and share their multimedia

content (photos, videos and audio) on the web. People can view the files

uploaded by others, enrich them with tags, and share their thoughts through

comments (Faizi et al., 2013). Examples of such social media as tools are

YouTube and even Tik-tok . Educators of any level can click on the education

category within YouTube and find several subcategories such as university,

science, business, and engineering. YouTube even has a special section

dedicated to teachers and how to teach with it. But, even if teachers never

visited that section, they could teach using all the great videos available

according to subjects or searches (Chesser, 2013).According to Shauna

Pomerantz, TikTok can help educators connect to students because it “is a lingua

franca for young people,” and by speaking their language and even just talking

with them about the platform, educators show that they are open to learning

about students’ worlds (Tutt, 2021).

All these social media platforms can be grouped into three major

categories. The first category includes social network sites like Facebook,

YouTube, and Twitter that serve as online communities via which users connect

with friends or colleagues, and share ideas and resources. The second category

consists of content sharing and organizing sites like Microsoft OneNote,

Pinteresr, Google Docs, Gmail. Often times, however, the features and functions

of a social media network can overlap, making a tool appropriate for more than

one category.

Jones (2015) said, social media technologies are no longer only used for

leisure. Rather, over the years, these technologies have also become platforms

for interacting and engaging with learners. In their recent study about the

tweeting behaviour of undergraduate students in some universities in Singapore,

Menkhoff et al. (2014) find that among other benefits, Twitter enables students

to have “a voice, to be more engaged and to interact more freely with both their
peers and the instructor via knowledge sharing and twitter discussions”. This

means that students who are expectantly captive in traditional approach to

teaching, are increasingly offered an opportunity to provide prompt feedback to

instructors, an element that Jones (2015) say leads to the much-treasured

student-centred learning approach.

In a related study, for a full semester, Soares (2008) used blogs to teach

English as a foreign language at a Brazilian university. At the end of the

semester, he distributed an online questionnaire to investigate students’

perception about blogs as learning tools and results showed that blogs

profoundly helped students improve their writing skills in English language by

accessing tutorials in the form of Podcasts and videos shared on their blogs and

Youtube channels.

Evidence about the benefits of social media in higher education are also

highlighted in a report by Conole &Alevizou (2010) commissioned by the Higher

Education Academy in the United Kingdom. By drawing data from published

reports, conference papers, journal articles and anecdotal evidence, Conole

&Alevizou (2010) made a statement that Twitter and blogs and other Web 2.0

technologies like Wikis are catalysts of scholarly practice and the sharing of

designs and good practice. This is made possible by allowing students to

participate in a distributed network of educators and researchers and to co-

create knowledge and develop a skill of critique of content (Conole &Alevizou,

2010).
 WeChat and QQ are the two most popular social media platforms in China

now (Statista, 2017). Previous studies on social media use in Chinese higher

education commonly fall into the following three categories. General discussion

about the feasibility and effects of adopting social media in teaching and

learning. Yue et al. (2014) argue that mobile education involving social media

platforms, such as WeChat, is a new experience in digital informatization

teaching and will be one of the indispensable learning modes in the future. Lu et

al. (2014) found that social media use in teaching resulted in positive effects,

such as enhancement of collaboration, creation of learning opportunities,

improvement in enthusiasm and engagement, and reduction in teaching costs. It

also led to some negative effects, such as lowering students’ independence,

integrity, and creativity, causing learning distractions, reducing persistence and

reflection, interfering by presenting improper information, and influencing the

development of students’ ability to communicate in the workplace.

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