AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF THE EDUCATIONAL EFFECTS OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES

Abstract

In an era of fundamental changes in education brought by virtual worlds and augmented reality, dominated by mobile devices and applications, it is necessary to rethink the educational environments based on the use of social applications like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, blogs and collaborative bookmarking systems, in accordance with the skills and learning needs of students. In this context, the authors discuss how today’s Romanian educational actors perceive and use social media, trying to find out the answers to questions such as: - How teachers and students use social media as reflective and collaborative teaching and learning tools, also for research and professional development? - Which is the relation between social media and mobile learning? - Which are the potential benefits, challenges, and disadvantages in using social media in universities and colleges? - How the usage can be extended, is there a need for training the educational actors in this topic? - Have the universities an official policy/strategy related to social media? - Is there any connection between social media usage and the universities' ranking? Thus in order to shed light on the research issues, we have developed and applied an online questionnaire for scholars from different universities and colleges from Romania. Although our findings revealed an increasing use of social media by educational actors for the time being, only a few universities have adopted coherent strategies and policies for the pedagogical integration of social media and the development of the best methods for teaching and learning based on these strategies.