The Effective Use of Social Media Networks for Collaborative Learning in Higher Education

Social Media Networks (SMN) are a priority area in higher education for improving student-centered collaborative learning. Despite this, students are not fully leveraging the learning capabilities that SMN offers. Therefore, understanding how students can effectively use SMN for collaborative learning is a pertinent question. This requires contextualizing effective use. To do so, we draw on affordance theory and identify relevant SMN affordances such as collaboration, communication, content sharing, and self-presentation. Given the social nature of SMN, we further investigated the role of social capital on SMN use for collaborative learning. We conducted a case study of undergraduate students who collaborate using SMN. We identified that both actualizing SMN affordances and the level of social capital among students influence their perception of attaining collaborative learning goals. Overall, we extend effective use studies developing and demonstrating its value in a new context and draw on a different theoretical foundation for its conceptualization.