An Investigation into Perceptions of Facebook-use in Higher Education

Abstract

This paper reports the complete process for and findings resulting from an individual-led research project entitled An Investigation into Perceptions of Facebook-use in Higher Education. The aim of the research project was primarily to investigate current perceptions of using Facebook as a means for interaction between students and lecturers at university level. Findings are based on data collected from two sample populations (students and lecturers) using qualitative research methodology. Tentative findings suggest that students in particular find using Facebook for this purpose to be most appealing and would embrace such initiative in the future, whereas lecturers seem split in opinion on the matter, which is in line with previous research on social media use in higher education.Keywords: Social media, Facebook, Higher Education, Student-teacher interaction, Student experience IntroductionIn the current Web 2.0 era, social media (SM) has become immensely popular, especially among younger people, including the student demographic that tend to use SM on a regular and very frequent basis. Facebook is today by far the most widely used SM application among not only people of all ages, but more specifically among students who seem to prefer Facebook over competing platforms as their primary social media, although they rarely remain entirely "Facebook-exclusive" as they also often use other SM platforms (McDermott 2014;Selwyn 2009). Recent statistics detail that Facebook had close to 1.5BN active users in March 2015 (Statista 2015), and research has previously reported that as much as 95% of students have Facebook accounts and use these actively.Given the current status of social media, it is conceivable that universities, or teachers/lecturers at universities would contemplate using social media to communicate or engage with students somehow, especially since it has also been argued that a significant portion of university staff also use Facebook quite regularly and as such are not necessarily foreign to SM platforms. It has however been argued that even though a large number of university staff also use Facebook regularly, students are generally more positive than staff to the idea of using Facebook within a higher education context (Robyler, McDaniel, Webb, Herman and Witty, 2010), but that teachers are becoming increasingly more aware of social media and its inherent possibilities for various applications. Selwyn (2012) argued regarding use of social media in higher education that "… growing numbers of educationalists are beginning to consider the possible significance and likely implications of social media for education practice and provision-especially in terms of higher education." (Selwyn, 2012, p. 2).In light of the fact that social media is indeed something which is most often used for personal activity rather than academic/professional activity by both students and staff at universities, it seems worthwhile to investigate social media use in this context if it is used for other purposes than perso...

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