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Top1. Introduction
The number of social media users around the world has arisen over the last years. It is expected to reach 3 billion by 2021 (Benedek, 2018). Facebook, for example, was the first social network platform that reached one billion monthly active users by the first quarter of 2017. Social media networks have been used for many different purposes including education (Greenhow & Lewin, 2016), commerce (Chen, Lu, & Wang, 2017), healthcare (Hubbell, 2018), politics (Sabatovych, 2019), and many more. The literature review on the role of social media in education has covered a different range of topics such as the relationship between social media and educational outcomes, learning patterns and best practices, and students’ online participation. In addition, some previous studies (e.g., Chugh & Ruhi, 2018; Price et al., 2018) have examined the role of social media networks in shaping students’ attitudes to collaboratively share and manage learning materials. Although there is much research that has shown positive relations between the use of social media platforms and students’ learning process, there is still limited research that has investigated the use of social media platforms by public universities. Some developing countries, such as Egypt, started to consider the role of social media platforms in developing students’ learning (Sobaih & Moustafa, 2016). In Egypt, there are currently 48 million active users on the Internet (52%) with 30% uses social media platforms. Facebook users reached about 27 million users in which 23 million of them uses mobile phones to access their Facebook pages.
The majority of social media users in Egypt consists of young people who are eager to use the social network for education purpose (Easa, 2019). Egypt has a total of 63 universities and academic institutions, of which 27 are state-sponsored universities. The number of students enrolled in these universities until 2018 is about 3.3 million students (www.youm7.com). Despite the large number of university students and the widespread use of technology, our preliminary study showed a notable lack of using learning management system (LMS) among students in most Egyptian government universities. This can be reasoned to the difficulties in obtaining the required financial and technological resources for these universities to effectively use LMS. As a result, some universities have been adopting other communication tools to help students and instructors share and manage the relevant learning resources. Therefore, exploring the use of social media platforms among students of public universities in Egypt is essential for understanding students’ behavioral intentions to adopt technology for learning purposes. Despite the extensive literature on social media and learning and mainly “informal learning”, there has been little evidence of using them for “formal learning” which is directed and mandated by universities. In addition, there seems to be little empirical basis for this assumption (Greenhow & Lewin, 2016). Thus, this study explored whether social media platforms can be used for promoting students’ learning development, and if so, to what extends, and how they are used by students and universities. Outcomes from this study can highlight the needs of the Egyptian public universities to utilize social media platforms as an educational tool, and maximize the benefits offered by them to enhance their students’ learning experience.
This paper has been divided into five sections. Section two reviews the literature. Section three presents the research methodology. Section four presents the research findings, followed by the implications and discussions of the results, and the conclusion.