Studierea impactului folosirii instrumentelor specifice social media în comunicarea cu studenții asupra procesului educațional în învătământul superior

Abstract

Drawing from the experiences of today’s highly technologized industries and businesses, more and more universities and campuses have started using Web 2.0 Social Media instruments such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Blogs to facilitate collaboration and information sharing between all the actors involved: administrators, faculties and students. An analysis of the previous research attempts on Social Media usage in higher education revealed that universities are beginning or planning to provide support and infrastructure to support Social Media initiatives, and that Social Media tools are starting to be used as part of course content and delivery, and students can use them for collaboration and group decision making on real-world projects. However, much of the research to date can be considered to be rather descriptive and lacking objective evaluation. This paper argues that a more analytical and rigorous research is needed to compare and contrast specific features of the most important Social Media instruments, the way they are used and implemented and the outcomes that can be achieved, by students or by other stakeholders. Bearing in mind the necessity of guiding future research, we conducted an exploratory research among the students of the Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies in order to emphasize the impact that different Social Media instruments have on the educational process and the need of more formalized and complex research attempts that highlight such factors, as well as point out relevant outcome variables that should be measured.