Social Media for Academic Purpose: The Influencing Factors

Abstract

Social media has become the most popular way of transporting information and the number of users has been rapidly increasing all over the world. Most importantly, students these days can be defined as members of the digital native or network generation, born in digital era while interact with digital technology since childhood. Social media can be defined as a fairly large tool for collaborative media creation and sharing of information with one another and can impact students both positively and negatively as it provides positive conditions for instructions and study. Several researches show University professors are adopting social media for discussion meetings in order to help students in academic learning and through effective connection and collaboration inside and outside the classroom. This research will show the influencing factors for students’ satisfaction in using social media for academic purpose which is interacting with peers, interacting with supervisor, perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness.   A total of 200 respondents from two different universities participated in this research. Samples were selected using convenience sampling and the respondents answered the questionnaire via Google form and paper and pencil method. The data collected and also information in this research are highly beneficial and valuable to students, supervisors, academics, researchers, learning institution and the government as we are able to gauge and understand the factors influencing students’ satisfaction in using social media for academic purpose. However, there are some limitations as this research does not reflect the actual student population in tertiary education in Malaysia and it only focuses on four variables i.e. interacting with peers, interacting with supervisor, perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness. There are several possibilities for future researches whereby one can focus more on other influencing factors such as pervasive technology usage, tech savvy future generations, convenience and many more.