Social Media in Teaching and Learning--an Example of the Tourism Management Faculty in Haikou

Abstract

The tourism management Faculty personal use of social media has shown an ever increasing trend the professional use of social media has lagged somewhat behind. A majority of tourism management faculty now use social media in a professional context (including all aspects of their profession outside of teaching). This paper attempts to ascertain the current faculty usage of social media. The study used the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use Technology (UTAUT) to ascertain the faculty perception towards social media Garret's Ranking method to rank tourism management faculty preferences while choosing a social media site for teaching learning purpose. Statistical tools along with percentage analysis were used to analyze the data. The results indicated that although tourism management faculty had high effort expectancy, performance expectancy, behavioral intention, social influence and facilitating conditions for the adoption of social media their usage was largely found to be high for the purpose of reading /listening /watching content rather than for creation of new content. The study also reports the prime barriers to social media usage by tourism management faculty as the lack of integration of social media with the learning management system, lack of social media effectiveness measures and privacy concerns.