The Opportunities and Challenges of Social Media in Higher Education: A Literature Review

This paper presents a review of the use of social media for learning and teaching in higher education, as well as the opportunities and challenges revealed from its use. A total of 77 related case studies published from 2010 to 2019 were collected from Scopus and Google Scholar for analysis. The results showed that social media was usually used as a learning management system and for enhancing learner engagement. The use of social media has brought opportunities for educational practices in terms of its high popularity among students, and its capacity to support two-way communication, easy knowledge sharing, community building, and collaborative learning, which enhance student learning experience. The challenges reported in the case studies cover the blurring of the boundary between the public and private life of students and between the relationships of students and instructors, as well as its doubtful effectiveness for knowledge construction, the inadequacy of instructors’ pedagogical and technological skills, and the lack of integration with instructional design. The results suggest the need for further work on examining suitable ways of using social media which would be viewed positively and accepted by users. There should also be future work on surveying the need for support for instructors for their involvement in teaching with social media, and developing effective pedagogies which cope with the features of social media.