AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF THE EDUCATIONAL EFFECTS OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES
AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF THE EDUCATIONAL EFFECTS OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES

Summary/Abstract: In an era of fundamental changes in education brought by virtual worlds and augmented reality, dominated by mobile devices and applications, it is necessary to rethink the academic work environments based on the use of social applications like Facebook, YouTube or Twitter, in accordance with the skills and learning needs of students. In this context the authors discuss how today’s Romanian higher education actors perceive and use social media, trying to find out the answers to questions such as: How faculty members use social media as reflective and collaborative teaching and learning tools, also for research and professional development? Which are the potential benefits, challenges, and disadvantages in using social media in universities? Is there a need for training the educational actors in this topic? Thus in order to shed light on the research issues, we have developed and applied an online questionnaire for scholars from different universities and colleges from Romania. Although our findings revealed an increasing use of social media by educational actors for the time being, only a few universities have adopted coherent strategies and policies for the pedagogical integration of social media and the development of the best methods for teaching and learning based on these strategies.

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