Beyond mandatory use: Probing the affordances of social media for formal learning in the voluntary context

Abstract

The integration of social media in formal education has received consistent interest in the recent decade. While most studies have focused on the mandatory use of social media as pedagogical tools, less explored is the context in which students voluntarily choose and use social media to supplement their formal learning. In this study, we employ an affordance approach to exploring the resources in social media that students perceive and use voluntarily for formal learning. Drawing on a qualitative study using focus groups of university students, we identified ten categories of social media affordances for learning in the voluntary context: association, editability, immediacy, interactivity, manageability, modality, persistence, scalability, searchability, and visibility. The affordances mentioned most frequently by students were visibility, persistence, and interactivity. These identified affordances encompass the major resources offered by social media for learning in the voluntary context, and provide insights into understanding, evaluating, and guiding social media adoption in formal education as well as lifelong learning. This paper concludes by presenting limitations and implications for research and practice.

Drivers and barriers to MOOC adoption: perspectives from adopters and non-adopters

“…This is especially helpful for students in developing countries or regions who have limitations to access quality course materials (Ma and Lee, 2017;Moura et al, 2018). This finding is aligned with recent trend, suggesting that learning can be more efficient and effective when appropriate online learning resources are integrated with formal classroom learning (Zhou et al, 2018;Alraimi et al, 2015). Such integration in formal education is also deemed to be important for preparing students for life-long learning (Greenhow and Lewin, 2016).…”

“…The strength of volitional behaviors that help learners to self-regulate and persist in the learning process Self-regulation is critical for success in MOOC learning where the learning process is autonomous, while lack of selfregulation hinders learners from adopting MOOCs (Barnard, et al, 2009) (Onah and Sinclair, 2017) (Zhou et al, 2018) Table II.…”

Teenagers and Videoconference Fatigue: A Preliminary Analysis from an Affordance‐based Approach

“…The camera function on VC facilitates visibility‐related affordances, which enable a user to see self and other users' behaviors (Treem & Leonardi, 2013). Information‐related affordances enable users to organize, control, process and manage information (Väljataga et al, 2010; Zhou et al, 2018) and audio, video, and chat features of VC technologies facilitate this. Availability‐related affordances enable users to get immediate responses or updates from other users (Gibbs et al, 2013; Lee, 2010) due to the users’ status availability and contact information shown on the platform.…”