Social Media Engagement in Higher Education
Summary
Social media engagement in higher education encompasses the ways in which students, staff and institutions interact through online platforms to enrich teaching, learning, research and community building. This engagement ranges from formal academic discourse on microblogging sites to informal peer support in content-sharing networks. Metrics such as likes, comments, shares and contributions serve as proxies for participation, motivation and collaborative knowledge construction. Benefits include rapid feedback loops, enhanced digital literacies, global networking and opportunities for reflective practice. Challenges centre on managing distractions, ensuring equitable access, safeguarding data privacy and guiding appropriate professional conduct. Institutions worldwide are experimenting with hybrid pedagogies that integrate social tools into curricula—such as student-generated multimedia case studies, peer-review forums and virtual study communities—thereby reshaping traditional boundaries between campus and online spaces and granting learners greater autonomy over their educational journey.
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Social Media Engagement in Higher Education publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in social media engagement in higher education across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Microlearning: The delivery of educational content in small, focused units that learners can access on demand via mobile or social platforms.
Technology Acceptance Model (TAM): A theoretical framework evaluating users’ perceived usefulness and ease of use of a technological tool to predict its adoption and sustained engagement.
Social media taxonomy: A structured classification of social media tools and functionalities organised according to educational objectives and cognitive processes.
References
- A taxonomy of social media for learning. Computers & Education (2024).
- Microlearning through TikTok in Higher Education. An evaluation of uses and potentials. Education and Information Technologies (2023).
- Responses to COVID-19 in Higher Education: Social Media Usage for Sustaining Formal Academic Communication in Developing Countries. Sustainability (2020).
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