Exploring the use of social media in education from learners perspective

Abstract

Social media has affected different fields of our lives, students are using and contributing to social media tools formally and informally, to benefit from networking, research, engagement and motivation. In this research, we explored the use of social media tools by students in term of formal and informal learning, inside and outside the learning management system (LMS). We designed an online survey distributed to higher education students in Saudi Arabia. The number of participants were (102), and (88) of them were female student, the rest were male students. The results show that social networking tools are the top consumed tools with (81%) of responses, on the other hand, document sharing tools are the top tool the participants contribute to with (58%) responses. There is a significant difference in the use of social media based on scope of use, inside and outside LMS, this difference is due to the nature of the tools, academic level and scope of interactions.