Vol.7, No.1, February 2018.                                                                                                                                                                     ISSN: 2217-8309

                                                                                                                                                                                                                eISSN: 2217-8333

TEM Journal

TECHNOLOGY, EDUCATION, MANAGEMENT, INFORMATICS

Association for Information Communication Technology Education and Science

Use of Social Media in Higher Education Institutions – an Empirical Study Based on Bulgarian Learning Experience

Silvia Parusheva, Yanka Aleksandrova, Antonio Hadzhikolev

© 2018 Silvia Parusheva et al, published by UIKTEN. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Citation Information: TEM Journal. Volume 7, Issue 1, Pages 171-181, ISSN 2217-8309, DOI: 10.18421/TEM71-21, February 2018.

Received: 31 October 2017
Accepted: 27 January 2018
Published: 23 February 2018

Abstract:

Social media have enormous power and trigger changes in whole spectrum of businesses, as well as learning and education. A study of students’ adoption of social media at the University of Economics – Varna (UE-Varna), Bulgaria, has proven its significant impact on young people. Using online questionnaire among 378 students, the high popularity of social media has been confirmed. An important research question is whether higher education institutions teaching students mainly in the fields of social, economic and legal sciences use the benefits of the social media in the context of Learning Management Systems (LMSs) and integrated social media tools. The majority of the examined 24 universities use two LMSs - Moodle and Blackboard Learn. Both possess tools like forums, chat, wikis, internal messaging, blogs, learning groups, collaboration tools. The study of the two Moodle platforms implemented at the UE-Varna shows use of discussion forums, chat, and internal messaging.

Keywords – Web 2.0, Social media, Higher education institutions, Learning Management Systems, Integrated social media tools, Discussion forums, Chat.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Full text PDF >  

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------