Social Media in Higher Education: Integrated Practices, Boundary Negotiations, and Scholarly Communication among selected Educators
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.65310/cq7v0998Kata Kunci:
social media in education, digital scholarship, qualitative descriptive research, professional learning networks, higher education.Abstrak
The expansion of social media has altered communication across higher education, yet little research examines how educators navigate digital platforms across interconnected professional domains. This qualitative descriptive study explored the self-reported practices and public digital artifacts of 12 purposively selected, digitally active educators from five world regions. Data comprised semi-structured interviews (60–90 minutes) and a corpus of 156 public artifacts (48 microblogging threads, 36 professional-networking posts, 24 webinar recordings, 28 Discord and open-resource channels, and 20 blog entries), gathered through combined participant submission and independent researcher collection. A single researcher analyzed the data using reflexive thematic analysis, and identifiers were removed from all artifacts. Four themes were developed: perceived instructional scaffolding and student participation; decentralized professional learning networks; scholarly communication and perceived research visibility; and boundary maintenance, epistemic noise, and digital risk management. Participants described structured, moderated platform use as supporting low-latency instruction, peer collaboration, and research dissemination, alongside deliberate boundary management in response to context collapse and institutional oversight. Findings reflect educator perceptions only. Student learning outcomes and citation impacts were not measured, and the purposive sample of digitally active educators limits transferability. The study suggests that institutions should treat informal networked practice as legitimate professional development and provide clear, non-punitive guidance on public engagement.
Unduhan
Referensi
Ali, S., & Proff, A. (2026). Exploring the role of social media in educational support and mental wellbeing of university students in the UAE. Frontiers in Education, 11, Article 1853142. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1853142
Alshwiah, A., & Alaulamie, L. (2023). Social media usage and its association with students' performance and attitude in Saudi Arabia. Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education, 15(2), 355–368. https://doi.org/10.1108/JARHE-11-2021-0417
Alsumaiti, T., Al Hosani, N., Yagoub, M. M., Hussein, K., Al-Sumaiti, A. S., Almurshidi, A., & Al Tenaijy, M. (2026). Faculty acceptance and instructional use of social media in higher education: A quantitative case study from the United Arab Emirates. Social Sciences, 15(9), Article 568. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci15090568
Anderson, T., & Dron, J. (2011). Three generations of distance education pedagogy. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 12(3), 80–97. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v12i3.890
Bhasa, M. P. (2026). Reimagining higher education: The role of social media as a pedagogical tool in university learning environments. London Review of Education, 24(1), Article 12. https://doi.org/10.14324/LRE.24.1.12
boyd, d. (2014). It's complicated: The social lives of networked teens. Yale University Press.
Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa
Creswell, J. W. (2014). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (4th ed.). SAGE Publications.
de Oliveira Neto, J. D., Law, V., & Kang, S. (2024). Adoption of open educational resources in the global south. Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 36, 116–140. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12528-023-09351-8
Duan, C., & Wong, B. T. M. (2026). Faculty perspectives on open educational resources: A case study of a Hong Kong higher education institution. PLOS ONE, 21(8), Article e0349147. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0349147
González, P., Fors, M., & Torres, A. (2025). Altmetrics in the evaluation of scholarly impact: A systematic and critical literature review. Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics, 10, Article 1693304. https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2025.1693304
Issa, T., Alqahtani, S. G. B., Al-Oqily, I., Baltaci Goktalay, S., Köse, U., Issa, T., Abu Salih, B., & Almufaraj, W. K. (2021). Use of social networking in the Middle East: Student perspectives in higher education. Heliyon, 7, Article e06676. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2021.e06676
Jordan, K., & Weller, M. (2018). Academics and social networking sites: Benefits, problems, and tensions in professional engagement with online networking. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2018(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.448
Junco, R., & Cotten, S. R. (2012). No A 4 U: The relationship between multitasking and academic performance. Computers & Education, 59(2), 505–514. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2011.12.023
Livingstone, S., Sefton-Green, J., & Bober, M. (2015). The class: Living and learning in the digital age. NYU Press.
Luo, T., Freeman, C., & Stefaniak, J. (2020). "Like, comment, and share"—Professional development through social media in higher education: A systematic review. Educational Technology Research and Development, 68(4), 1659–1683. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-020-09790-5
Machado, C., Hsiao, P.-Y., Vaccaro, C., & Baker, C. (2024). Entering the social media stratosphere: Higher education faculty use of social media with students across four disciplines. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2024(1), Article 8. https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.854
Malterud, K., Siersma, V. D., & Guassora, A. D. (2016). Sample size in qualitative interview studies: Guided by information power. Qualitative Health Research, 26(13), 1753–1760. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732315617444
Manca, S., & Ranieri, M. (2016). Facebook and the others: Potentials and obstacles of social media for teaching in higher education. Computers & Education, 95, 216–230. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2016.01.012
Marwick, A. E., & boyd, d. (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13(1), 114–133. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365313
Mercader, C., & Gairín, J. (2020). University teachers' perception of barriers to the use of digital technologies: The importance of the academic discipline. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 17, Article 4. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-020-0182-x
Moeller, B. (2004). Technology's role in educational reform: Findings from a national study of innovating schools. Center for Children and Technology.
Moghavvemi, S., Sulaiman, A., Jaafar, N. I., & Kasem, N. (2018). Social media as a complementary learning tool for teaching and learning: The case of YouTube. The International Journal of Management Education, 16(1), 37–42. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijme.2017.12.001
Pepper, C., Perez Vallejos, E., & Carter, C. J. (2023). "I don't feel like there's enough awareness about the damage that social media does": A thematic analysis of the relationships between social media use, mental wellbeing, and care experience. Youth, 3(4), 1244–1267. https://doi.org/10.3390/youth3040079
Purvis, A. J., Rodger, H. M., & Beckingham, S. (2020). Experiences and perspectives of social media in learning and teaching in higher education. International Journal of Educational Research Open, 1, Article 100018. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedro.2020.100018
Saputra, A. (2025). Educational social media interactions: Its impact on learning and students' social life: A literature review. Journal of Foundational Learning and Child Development, 1(1), Article 6. https://doi.org/10.53905/ChildDev.v1i01.6
Shi, Y. R., Sin, K. F. K., & Wang, Y. Q. (2025). Teacher professional development of digital pedagogy for inclusive education in the post-pandemic era: Effects on teacher competence, self-efficacy, and work well-being. Teaching and Teacher Education, 168, Article 105230. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2025.105230
Sugimoto, C. R., Work, S., Larivière, V., & Haustein, S. (2017). Scholarly use of social media and altmetrics: A review of the literature. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 68(9), 2037–2062. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23833
Veletsianos, G., Houlden, S., Hodson, J., & Gosse, C. (2018). Women scholars' experiences with online harassment and abuse: Self-protection, resistance, acceptance, and self-blame. New Media & Society, 20(12), 4689–4708. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818781324
Vitak, J. (2012). The impact of context collapse and privacy on social network site disclosures. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56(4), 451–470. https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2012.732140
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.
Xu, T., Gao, Q., Ge, X., & Lu, J. (2024). The relationship between social media and professional learning from the perspective of pre-service teachers: A survey. Education and Information Technologies, 29(2), 2067–2092. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-023-11861-y
Yan, W., Zhang, Y., Hu, T., & Kudva, S. (2021). How does scholarly use of academic social networking sites differ by academic discipline? A case study using ResearchGate. Information Processing & Management, 58(1), Article 102430. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2020.102430
Zhou, Y., Gu, H., Wang, Q., Tornquist, M., & Zhang, X. (2025). Professional development of expatriate higher education faculty through informal and incidental learning on social media. European Journal of Education, 60(1), Article e12871. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.12871
Unduhan
Diterbitkan
Terbitan
Bagian
Lisensi
Hak Cipta (c) 2026 Gianne Rensen Antonio (Author)
Artikel ini berlisensiCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
