The Factors Affecting Students' Intention to Use Social Networks as an Educational Facilitation Tool in the Covid-19 Pandemic Age

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic in the world proved that the current style of education needs to be revised and reconsidered and the potentials of information technology should be further used in education. Understanding the attitude of users in using social networks seems to be highly important due to the increased use of online social networks. In this study, we targeted the evaluation of factors affecting students' intention to use social networks as an educational facilitating tool in the Covid-19 pandemic era based on the Davis Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and other studies in this area. To this end, we first reviewed the literature to extract the factors affecting the intention of students to use social networks, based on which, the structural equations model was formed. This study was conducted among 200 students. The partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) technique was used to analyze the data. The findings analysis indicated the usefulness of the perceived use and perceived ease of use on the intention to use social networks. The results of this study provide fruitful insight into the use of social networks as an educational facilitation tool for policy-makers.