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

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.