Social Media Use in Higher Education : Students’ Perceptions of Using Facebook to Support Peer Interaction and Educational Learning

The evolution of technology has brought several benefits in the world of education and many new teaching and learning methods are being implemented. In view of social media for learning is quite modern and interesting. Facebook as a social media is a networking site with functionalities that facilitate users to share information through internet connections with the aid of electronic devices such as computer, phones, and tablets. The number of active users on Facebook is growing fast in various fields including education field. Today students in higher education use Facebook to communicate and share ideas, cooperating and finding solutions. But different aspects need to be examined like how Facebook support student peers. This study was conducted at Linnaeus University and research participants were students from different departments,both bachelor and master levels. The main purpose of this study is to investigate students’ perceptions of using Facebook to support peer interaction and educational learning, identify benefits and limitations associated to Facebook usage and provide suggestions that may improve peer interaction and educational learning on Facebook. Concerning to the purpose of the research questions “How students perceive using Facebook to support peer interaction and Educational Learning? and What are student perspective on the benefits and limitations of using Facebook in educational learning?” Were investigated. A qualitative interpretative research study was conducted and data was collected through interviews. The main results include students who agreed that Facebook functionalities such as messenger, sharing, posts, like, pages and groups enable them to interact easily since students use Facebook more when compared to other social media. But factors like peers who are not active, unnecessary chatting, connection issue, inaccessibility, privacy and security that may arise on Facebook environment play an unfavorable role in perceiving learning.