Social Media Use and Expectations in the Teaching and Learning Process: The Opinions of the Faculty Members

Nowadays, social media tools used in all fields such as politics, health, economy, transportation, public services are also used in the learning and teaching process. The main aim of this research is to investigate academic administrators’ and faculty members’ perceptions concerning the reasons and the expectations of social media usage in the teaching and learning process. With this purpose, semi-structured interviews were carried out with 20 academic teaching faculty members from different academic units, titles, and positions at Aksaray University in Turkey. According to the findings of this research, the use of social media in the teaching and learning process was similar in terms of faculty that use or not use. In this study, both the benefits and challenges of using social media for teaching and learning purposes were identified. It has been determined that the faculty members who use social media prefer YouTube most and even the ones against find YouTube useful and use them effectively in their courses. The motives stated by the faculty that use social media were; student-centered reasons such as students’ preference to use these environments, contributing to students’ perceptions and learning, fast and effective communication with students, as well as accessibility and equal opportunities in education. Those who do not prefer to use social media claimed the students’ unethical behavior in these platforms, the difficulty of creating a traditional classroom environment, and maintaining the relationship between the learner and the teacher. As a result, in order to integrate social media tools with the teaching and learning process, it is necessary to raise awareness of faculty members and students and to use social media tools that have a code of ethics, appropriate and can be integrated into the learning environments.