Evaluating the quality of social media in an educational context

Abstract

Social media enhanced learning systems bring new challenges to evaluate learning environments. Many features are common with any websites and can be evaluated with common criteria. But with social media users can also contribute content, change opinions and create communities for different needs, which bring new dimensions to a quality evaluation. This research focused on finding out which are the most important characters and functions in social media enhanced learning system in the context of higher education. The paper also reports the former research results that were used as a background for this study. Earlier researches were carried out in 2008-2009 and they focused on how to evaluate social media sites, what are the students' expectations and what motivates them to use social media in higher educational context.

What motivates high school teachers to use web-based learning resources for classroom instruction? An exploratory case study in an Iranian smart school

“…The teachers perceived that web resources have the potential to capture students' interests to be active in the learning process, because the students preferred such resources and were keen users. Several researchers (Abrizah & Zainab, 2011;Afshari et al, 2009;Bland et al, 1979;Kay et al, 2009;Light & Polin, 2010;Recker et al, 2004;Silius et al, 2011;Wu et al, 2005) have confirmed that using digital resources provided an opportunity to engage students with the learning process and establish an effective student-centered teaching-learning environment.…”

“…Similar to the teachers who participated in the current study, the teacher participants of previous studies (Light & Polin, 2010;Silius et al, 2011) also believed that using web resources allow them to feel more connected to their students and provide a new way of engaging them in classroom learning.…”

“…Previous research reveal that K-12 learners' information use and behavior have changed from searching for, and using, traditional resources to web resources (Berger, 2010;Murphy & Lebans, 2008;Rahimi, Den Berg, & Veen, 2012;Sadaf, Newby, & Ertmer, 2012). Teachers are encouraged to use WBLRs and social media in order to capture their students' motivation as well as to improve the latter's learning retention (Drigas, Ioannidou, Kokkalia, & Lytras, 2014;Kay, Knaack, & Petrarca, 2009;Light & Polin, 2010;Silius, Kailanto, & Tervakari, 2011), and teachers believe by doing so would enable them to conduct student-centred learning more effectively (Abrizah & Zainab, 2011;Bland, Sabatino, Sedlak, & Sternberg, 1979;Kay et al, 2009;Light & Polin, 2010;Prestridge, 2012;Recker, Dorward, & Nelson, 2004;Silius et al, 2011;Wu, Chen, & Hsieh, 2005).…”

Stimulating Class Discussion Using an Online Newspaper Created with Twitter and Paper.li

“…Social media services can be broadly divided into six categories: content creation and publishing, content sharing, social networking sites, collaborative productions, virtual worlds, and add-ons (Silius, Kailanto, & Tervakari, 2011). Popular Web sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and so on certainly fall within this definition, and many university courses utilize such commercially available services.…”

A tool for evaluating social media enhanced learning environments

“…Learning environments should also be "pedagogically usable" and support the different types of learners by providing various learning contexts according to selected pedagogical objectives [1] [2]. 1 WeSQu is available at http://iislab.ee.tut.fi/wesqu II.…”