ACADEMICIANS’ USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS FOR EDUCATION: AN ASSESSMENT ON COMMUNICATION FACULTIES IN TURKEY AND IN BALTIC COUNTRIES

Social media is a wide platform that enables individuals to present their thoughts, views, interests in an interactive medium. Today social media tools are used for education and training purposes. Moving on from this point of view, this study tries to present how social media tools are used by the academicians and the academicians’ thoughts on how the use of social media for educational purposes is beneficial. In this respect, Turkey, which becomes a newly industrialized country in 2011, and Latvia, which is an example of a developing country in Baltic countries, and Estonia, which is considered as a developed country, constitute the universe of research. A survey carried out on the academic staff of the higher educational institutions of the relevant countries which have departments relating to public relations. At the same time, an analysis was held intended to check if there are any courses on the social media in the curriculum of the public relations departments of the higher education institutions that have communication faculties in the subject countries. The results of the survey demonstrate that academicians prefer social media tools as a means of “correspondence and information exchange” and for “socialization” purposes. According to the academicians the primary benefit of social media tools for educational purposes is that “it enables information exchange independent of space and time”. A majority of academicians from Turkey thinks that the use of social media tools for educational purposes is easy to learn; on the other hand this ratio is below 50 % for academicians from Latvia. When curriculum is taken into consideration, higher education institutions in Turkey gives more courses on social media compared to the higher educational institutions in Latvia.