Students' perceptions of Facebook for academic purposes

Abstract

Facebook is the most popular Social Network Site (SNS) among college students. Despite the popularity and extensive use of Facebook by students, its use has not made significant inroads into classroom usage. In this study, we seek to examine why this is the case and whether it would be worthwhile for faculty to invest the time to integrate Facebook into their teaching. To this end, we decided to undertake a study with a sample of 214 undergraduate students at the University of Huelva (Spain). We applied the structural equation model specifically designed by Mazman and Usluel (2010) to identify the factors that may motivate these students to adopt and use social network tools, specifically Facebook, for educational purposes. According to our results, Social Influence is the most important factor in predicting the adoption of Facebook; students are influenced to adopt it to establish or maintain contact with other people with whom they share interests. Regarding the purposes of Facebook usage, Social Relations is perceived as the most important factor among all of the purposes collected. Our findings also revealed that the educational use of Facebook is explained directly by its purposes of usage and indirectly by its adoption.