Social Media and Use of Technology in Higher Education

Abstract

Social media has, in the past decade, transformed the way students and faculty communicate in the teaching and learning process. The teaching and learning process in higher education is currently experiencing a technological revolution. This is mainly because social media is presently used as a tool by faculty and administrators to communicate with students inside and outside of the classroom. In this chapter, descriptive statistics are used to analyze secondary data on the trend of faculty use of social media by discipline, demographics, and number of years. It also analyzes the use of social media sites, barriers to the use of social media sites, as well as faculty use of social media in higher education. Results show that less than 50% of faculty use social media for instruction. Overall, younger faculty (under 35 years) report the use of SMT 55.7% more than older faculty (55 and above years). Faculty in Arts and Humanities indicate a higher use of social media than all disciplines. There is a strong correlation between faculty use of social media for professional and pedagogical purposes. The majority of faculty use SMT more often for personal reasons than instructional purposes. Results indicate that there is a high faculty awareness of social media use in higher education in recent years, and issues of privacy and integrity of online student submissions emerge as barriers to faculty use of social media.