Social networking in undergraduate education

Abstract

The current generation of students entering higher education are digital natives who have been raised in a techno-centric world where omnipresent technologies play an integral role in human life and where new innovations are quickly absorbed and assimilated. In order to develop learning communities with increased student engagement, educators are increasingly adopting the use of social networks to supplement teaching and learning in both fully online as well as traditional classroom learning environments. This paper explores the efficacy of social networking systems as instructional tools by presenting the results of a study that examined the perceptions of management students who completed courses at a U.S. Mid-Atlantic minority-serving university that used Facebook to augment instruction.