The Role of Social Media for Collaborative Learning to Improve Academic Performance of Students and Researchers Al-Rahmi, Othman, and Yusuf This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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H8: There is a significant relationship between collaborative learning and researcher’s
satisfaction.
H9: There is a significant relationship between collaborative learning and academic performance.
Social Media Use and Engagement Engagement, in the context of social media, results in a learning environment characterized by
greater collaboration and communication brought about by peer discussion and interactions
(Heafner & Friedman, 2008; Jackson, 2011; Liu et al., 2011). Additionally, prior studies (Arnold &
Paulus, 2010; Dawson, 2008; Hurt et al., 2012; Al-Rahmi et al., 2014; Top, 2012) contended that
social media opens the doors to developing a higher sense of student community via collaboration
among peers on certain topics. Moreover, social networking sites (SNSs), social capital, and
psychological well-being offer an additional link to student learning through the mechanism of
academic engagement, and increase engagement with school and academics (June, 2011). On the
one hand, students who enjoy their experience become highly engaged with the social media,
which is often viewed positively by students and researchers, and technology providers. Turel and
Serenko, (2012) suggest that enjoyment can lead to presumably positive outcomes, such as high
engagement. More specifically, Dawson (2008) claimed that the degree of students’ perception of
community may be influenced by the presence of social networks, where students communicating
with many peers feel a higher sense of community. Using social media also offers a sense of
community among students by providing them a chance to personalize their profiles, add pictures
and specific personal information as contended by Arnold and Paulus (2010), Stevens (2009),
and Al-Rahmi and Othman (2013a). Moreover, Facebook enables students who are not active to
increase their participation in learning activities (Meishar-Tal, Kurtz & Pieterse, 2012). Such
personalization and examination of curriculum support an actual connection among students by
encouraging their information sharing and ultimately this leads to their perceived learning (Hurt,
Moss, Bradley, Larson, Lovelace, Prevost & Camus, 2012; Top, 2012). Furthermore, Elsweiler and
Harvey (2014) suggested that Twitter search is primarily a device for mental and social
engagement and a means to stay informed in a dynamic information world and it is this social
dynamism that makes this new source of information quite different to those of the earlier web.
On a final note, the collaboration of researchers with peers with the help of social media may
facilitate a creative learning environment and thus the following hypotheses are proposed;
H10: There is a significant relationship between engagement and researchers satisfaction.
H11: There is a significant relationship between engagement and academic performance.