No abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the educational sector, pushing it towards teaching–learning methodologies where the online aspect takes on special importance. In this sense, social media are tools that facilitate the creation of meaningful and sustainable learning environments. This study shares an educational experience where TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Talks are introduced as a pedagogical resource through YouTube and LinkedIn in a sport management course. A total of five TED Talks are viewed and discussed by the students in order to develop their professional profile, assisted by a set of initial questions posed by faculty. To assess the impact of the experience, a new scale is created and then validated. The analyses performed reflected the unidimensional nature of this scale, explaining the 64.36% of the variance, and presenting good psychometric properties (α = 0.95). Furthermore, the results obtained reflect the educational potential of TED Talks in the context of sport management, with increases in the averages of all the items from the scale, with significant (p < 0.05) increases in six of them. Both the new validated instrument and the shared pedagogical proposal can be valuable to guide and evaluate future educational experiences which introduce TED Talks as a pedagogical resource in sport management education.

Although social media has an increasing presence both in university and sports settings, in the sports-management education context, no instruments (without being focused on one particular social-media platform, e.g., Facebook and Twitter) have been developed and validated that globally allow the academy to explore the perceptions of sports-management students concerning the educational and professional learning potential that these tools offer. Therefore, this research’s main objective is to develop and perform a preliminary validation of the social media as an educational and professional tool student perceptions scale (SMEPT-SPS). This study sample was composed of 90 Spanish undergraduate sports-management students (M = 22.56; SD = 3.55). A multigroup confirmatory factor analysis was performed to examine the psychometric properties of the SMEPT-SPS. The statistical analysis reflects the scale’s three-dimensional nature, explaining 67.87% of the variance and presents adequate psychometric properties (α = 0.87). Nevertheless, further validity and reliability analysis are required to confirm these initial findings with a larger and more representative sample. Considering the foregoing limitation, this research contributes to the literature by providing a new instrument, the SMEPT-SPS, that could help sports-management faculty expand the scope and understanding of social media’s educational and professional potential.