Acceptability of Social Media Use in Out-of-Class Faculty-Student Engagement

Abstract

In this exploratory study, higher education faculty perceptions regarding acceptability of social media use for out-of-class student engagement are identified. Hypotheses are developed and tested using a survey to address the impact of factors such as awareness, faculty/student relationship status, gender, academic discipline, and rank on faculty attitudes toward out-of-class social media use for student engagement. Findings indicate that faculty members are aware of social media, but use varies. Overall, they do not view social media as an important part of out-of-class engagement, but it is viewed as more acceptable for engagement with former students. In addition, faculty from Marketing and Communications disciplines and Associate/Full Professors perceive social media use to be more acceptable for student engagement when compared with their colleagues from other disciplines and lower ranks. Implications and conclusions are discussed for development of university social media usage policies and directions for future research.

Engaging university students in an ESL live broadcast

“…With the feature of stimulating people’s willingness and motivation for real-time interaction, live broadcasts can become a powerful learning medium for knowledge acquisition. With the form of the real-time communication learning model, direct transformation of teaching/learning events into instant messages deepens the process of learning and makes knowledge acquisition relevant to personal needs (Bresnahan et al , 2017; Hsu and Wang, 2019; Njoroge et al , 2018; Konstantakopoulos et al , 2019). Because of its synchronous nature, the broadcast media enable the audience to gain motivation from the enjoyment of participation.…”