EXPLORING THE USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA FOR COLLABORATIVE LEARNING

Thanks to the recent advances in information and communication technologies, the past two decades have witnessed a proliferation of social media. However, though primarily designed for communication and entrainment purposes, these online platforms have also been used by students as educational tools. Therefore, our objective in this article is to explore the use of social media for collaborative learning. In this vein, on the basis of the survey we conducted amongst higher education students, it was noticed that social networks (namely Facebook) are the most widely used. The findings of the study, actually, revealed that these virtual communities provide students with a single destination where they can jointly work together to achieve common goals. Students reported that, via such platforms, they can share insights and knowledge, support one another and collaborate in different learning tasks. Given the opportunities it offers, social media has caused a shift of learning from being an activity characterized by students’ individual acquisition of knowledge into a collective and collaborative experience. This collaboration, which can be asynchronous or synchronous, will undoubtedly promote a constructivist approach to learning in which students, together with their teachers and other members of the learning community, cooperate to carry out joint tasks and participate fully in educational activities that foster the overall learning experience.