Abstract:

The growth of social networking and its impact on people's involvement in a community has inevitable implications on the learning process. This article presents the influence of using social networks on educational performance. There have been identified factors of influence of educational performance and in order to identify the connections between them, Least Squares (PLS) were partially used.

In a globalized society, social networks along with e-mail have become the main method of online communication. Universities encouraging the use of new technologies in the educational process have the effect of increasing student academic performance (Al-Rahmi, W. M., Othman, M. S. 2014).

The current trend in education using social networks is their use as a medium for transmitting knowledge (Othman, 2012). As Internet has a promising future, the future of social networks has sparked the researchers' interest. Performance is assessed in terms of users' perspective, being measured based on their experience, relying on the same set of attributes as expectations. (Spreng et all., 1996). Educationally, performance can be measured by the degree of attaining the proposed educational objectives. Premkumar & Bhattacherjee (2008) defined three factors which define educational performance: acquiring new skills and knowledge, improving learning outcomes, learning flexibility (on their own and at their own pace).

The facilities offered by social networks as well as their increased popularity make them useful learning tools. Utility is the extent to which a person, using a certain system, believes its performance will be improved and the easiness perceived by use is the extent to which a person believes that the use of a system will involve as little effort as possible.

Social networks offer a new perspective on the world (Dulworth, 2008), providing support for problem solving and the possibility of receiving feedback which make them a good support for the learning process.

The purpose of research is to identify factors that influence the educational performance in terms of using social networks.
First step of research methodology was study of literature review and define the model for analyses educational performance based on the following factors of influence: integration in the social network community, program flexibility, and support offered by the social network community members, use of social networks. The statistical data were collected based on a questionnaire from 50 students from the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest. Hypothesis testing was conducted using Partial Least Squares (PLS) using SmartPLS 3 system (Ring et al., 2014).

After data analysis, the factor that has the greatest influence on educational performance is the support provided by members of the community social networks, followed by collaboration within social networks. Combining the advantages of remote education with social networks facilities, education via social networking sites places education in an easy, popular and accessible environment.
The resulting model can be used to evaluate certain scenarios regarding adaptation of solutions on online education.

The limitations of this research are due to few samples and maybe to the non-identification of the relevant factors for the assessment of education performance that we may analyze during subsequent extensions.

Keywords:

Social networks, learning performance, academic teaching.