Abstract—This paper tried to investigate the current situation
of using social media as tools for e-learning to support learning
at an emerging university in the south of Saudi Arabia. It also
examined the benefits of using social media tools in higher
education and the important role that these tools can play to
facilitate the educational process. Additionally, the barriers that
lecturers could face during the use of social media tools in the
educational process were examined. Participants in this study
were 10 lecturers. Semi-structured interviews were used to
collect data for this study. The results indicated that some of the
interviewees had very positive attitudes towards using social
media as tools for e-learning and felt that these tools were
extremely effective instructional tools and should be integrated
into the university curricula and that tutors should start using
them as tools to aid the other learning environments. However,
the results indicated that the major barriers to using these tools
in learning were a distraction, opposing Islamic religious
teachings, privacy issues, and cyberbullying. The study
recommended that this study could be replicated at other Saudi
universities to investigate factors and barriers that might affect
Saudi students’ attitudes toward using social media to support
learning.
Index Terms—Saudi Arabia, social media tools, higher
education, advantages of social media use, disadvantages to
social media use.
O. A. Alshehri is with the University of Glasgow, UK (tel.:
447454625470; e-mail: o.alshehri.1@research.gla.ac.uk).
Cite: Omar Alshehri, "Usage and Perceptions of Social Media Tools among Higher Education Instructors," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 9, no. 7, pp. 493-497, 2019.
Copyright © 2019 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).