Social media: a distraction or an educational tool?

Abstract

[Abstract:] This research is a promising starting point for teaching in the university environment and, more specifically, for students in the first year of studies with a high level of difficulty. It has been shown that social networks combined with other collaborative learning techniques can serve as an incentive and a focus of attraction for newly arrived students, even decreasing the stress that some of them experience with the change linked to university access. The authors want to continue applying and improving this technique in successive years, in more topics and subjects, to confirm its goodness and its influence on the success rate of the students. In this way, it will be possible to verify whether the outcomes obtained were the result of chance or whether they were conditioned by the limitations of the analysis, for example the low number of participating students and the situation of confinement of the population. In principle, the authors think that, on the contrary, the great acceptance of the initiative even under these circumstances is a sign of its potential. In this sense, it must be taken into account the difficult and novel situation experienced by the students, who had to adapt to a new online teaching mode from one day to the next and who could therefore have considered this activity as an additional overload. In any case, this assumption must be verified. Undoubtedly, the greatest limitation of this research lies in its gender perspective, as the percentage of female participants is clearly unrepresentative of the global university students. Nevertheless, it should be noted that this fact is often a reality in most STEAM careers (NASEM, 2020, p.38), where men are still a majority.