Use of Social Media in Professional Education: A Cross-Sectional Study among Teachers in India and Sri Lanka.

Abstract

Teachers are sophisticated users of social media. Although the faculty personal use of social media has shown ever-increasing trend the professional use of social media has lagged somewhat behind. A majority of faculty now uses social media in a professional context (including all aspects of their profession outside of teaching). The number of teachers who use social media in the classroom still does not represent a majority. They refer to different sites to match their varying personal, professional, and teaching needs. In general, they see considerable potential in the application of social media and technology to their teaching, but not without a number of serious barriers. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence and facilitating conditions of acceptance of social media in teaching and learning activities and the barriers that inhibit the minds of the management faculty in the use of it. The results indicate a positive inclination among teachers towards the use of social media for teaching-learning purposes with each of the indicator variables, performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence and facilitating conditions measuring higher than the benchmark. The dominant factor which emerged as a barrier to the usage of social media by the teachers was the lack of integration of social media with the learning management system.