How much is online community engaged in learning content? case of world top universities’ facebook

Abstract

Social media (SM) has become a part of everyday life, including higher education and its learning environment. Therefore, this study aims on understanding of content published on SM, its learning impact, as well as on identification of relevant level of community engagement. Research sample used official Facebook sites of six world top universities, specifically posts (N = 120) communicated during November 2018 were investigated in detail. A new scale, specifically designed for this study, was designed to capture a learning potential of content communicated on the SM. An analysis oriented on main characteristics of engagement: its responsiveness measured by number of “likes” and other available symbols, its involvement measured by number of comments, its virality, measured by number of sharings, and finally its total engagement expressed as the sum of preceding characteristics. Several interesting results are provided in the study: the research is the most frequent topic communicated by top universities; different content strategies are taken by universities to engage their communities; and different engagement levels exist according to the university as well as according to the content published on its Facebook site.