Abstract:

Several recent studies indicate that there is a need for increased use of ICT and social media in the Finnish education (Kärnä et al. 2014, Linna et al. 2015). This research was conducted in order to explore the attitude towards social media (SOME) use among university students. The motivation for seeking answer to research question: “What risks students experience in SOME use?” was to be able to discover the learning barriers in SOME learning environments. In particular, there is a need for novel interaction means in order to co-create and learn informally (Aramo-Immonen et al. 2015). The assumptions, beliefs and attitudes towards SOME are operationalized in experienced risks. As the ability to communicate with SOME is difficult to measure, we decided to explore the risk expectations of students. Furthermore we conducted this survey annually. It was extremely interesting to observe how the experienced risk was evolving among students while the familiarity of the SOME tools was growing.

Our research method was a longitudinal study, survey questionnaire conducted among the graduate students between years 2012-2016. The survey was executed among students of technical university. Access to students was communicated via Google Drive question form. The sample covered all students attending the “Communities and Social Media in Knowledge Management” courses. The empirical research questionnaire was answered by 133 respondents. The use and knowledge of social media tools were studied with open and multiple choice questions (Jussila et al. 2014).

Based on the findings we were able to categorize experienced risks. Furthermore we could observe how the experienced risk was evolving during the years. The main contribution of this study is the ability to lower the learning barriers among the university students in SOME learning environment by utilizing the analysis result of the collected data.

References:
[1] Aramo-Immonen, H., Jussila, J., Huhtamäki, J. (2015) Exploring co-learning behavior of conference participants with visual network analysis of Twitter data. Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 51, Part B, October 2015, Pages 1154-1162.
[2] Jussila, J. J., Kärkkäinen, H. and Aramo-Immonen, H. (2014), Social media utilization in business-to-business relationships of technology industry firms. Computers in Human Behavior. Vol. 30, Pages 606–613.
[3] Kärnä, M., Jaakkola, P., & Lehtonen, P. (2014). Social Media Challenges Vocational Teacher Education in Finland. In Conference proceedings. The future of education (p. 259). libreriauniversitaria. it Edizioni.
[4] Linna, P., Aramo-Immonen, H., Saari, M., Turunen, J., Jussila, J., Joel-Edgar, S., & Huhtala, M. (2015). Assessment of social media skills among vocational teachers in Finland. In proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies, Barcelona, Spain, 6-8 July, 2015pp. 4574-4581.

Keywords:

Social Media, Longitudinal study, university, survey.