COULD SOCIAL NETWORKS ENHANCE COMMUNICATION BETWEEN TEACHERS AND STUDENTS?

Even though social networks were not initially designed for academic purposes, they are gradually being used as educational tools. Many studies have, actually, shown that students are immersed in these social media platforms as they resort to them not only for communication and entertainment reasons, but for learning purposes as well. Given the promising role of these virtual spaces in enhancing education, and in view of the fact that interaction between teachers and students both in-class and out-of-class is one the major prerequisites for the success of every teaching and learning experience, our objective in this paper is to examine the potentials and promise of using social networking websites in enhancing teacher-student communication. In this context, based on the study that we conducted, it was revealed that almost 90% of the surveyed students use social networks, namely Facebook, as educational platforms. Nevertheless, it was noticed that interaction with teachers on this online platform is strictly minimal. In fact, while 80% of the students claimed to use Facebook primarily to interact with classmates and peers, only 27% of the subjects reported to adopt this social network as a communication channel with instructors.