SOCIAL MEDIA IN TEACHING AND LEARNING, STILL AN UNDEREXPLORED REALM

As the ubiquitous universe of social media continues to ever expand its horizons the faculty usage of social media is not very different from that of the larger population. While the faculty usage of social media in the classrooms makes them unique consumers of social media, this area still lags far behind the majority when compared to the usage of social media by other professionals. Faculty are sophisticated users of social media. Although the Faculty personal use of social media has shown a ever increasing trend the professional use of social media has lagged somewhat behind. A majority of faculty now use social media in a professional context (including all aspects of their profession outside of teaching). The number of faculty who use social media in the classroom still does not represent a majority.. They match different sites to their varying personal, professional, and teaching needs. In general, they see considerable potential in the application of social media and technology to their teaching, but not without a number of serious barriers. This paper attempts to ascertain the current faculty usage of social media. It also attempts to reckon the barriers that have deterred faculty from wide-scale usage of commercial social media tools in the classroom. A total of 87 faculty from various b-Schools were interviewed for the purpose of the study. The study used the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use Technology (UTAUT) to ascertain the faculty perception towards social media Garret’s Ranking method to rank faculty preferences while choosing a social media site for teaching learning purpose. Statistical tools along with percentage analysis were used to analyze the data. The results indicated that although faculty had high effort expectancy, performance expectancy, behavioral intention, social influence and facilitating conditions for the adoption of social media their usage was largely found to be high for the purpose of reading /listening /watching content rather than for creation of new content. The study also reports the prime barriers to social media usage by faculty as the lack of integration of social media with the learning management system, lack of social media effectiveness measures and privacy concerns