Social Media in the Academic Life of International Students in Turkey: A Survey Study

Yıl 2017, Cilt: 3 Sayı: 2, 205 - 218, 30.12.2017

Rajab İdd Muyıngo Ali Murat Kırık

Öz

As social media becomes the ideal
space of sharing information in a simple and convenient way, it continues to
attract numerous scholarly studies. This paper investigates the peculiarity of
social media in the academic life of international students in Turkey, with an
aim of ascertaining the social media tools used by international students.
Secondly is to scrutinize the academic purposes of social media usage among international
students in Turkey. The third objective is to determine the academic benefits
attained by international students in the usage of social media. This study was
inclined in the Uses and Gratification theory, the researcher considered a
randomly selected sample of international students in Istanbul City. Due to the
nature of this study both qualitative and quantitative approaches were applied.
Thus semi- structured interviews and questionnaires were used to get data on a
randomly selected sample. Observantly, social media platforms found vital in
the academic life of international students included; YouTube, Facebook,
WhatsApp and Twitter. In the same way, findings indicates that international
students frequently use social media for more than twice a week to interact
with their course mates as an encouragement for studying outside classroom.
Remarkably, international students benefit from social media as they use You
Tube to watch educational video clips on lectures delivered from other
universities to widen on their understanding on a particular subject. Equally,
Facebook and Whatsapp were purposely for instant messaging, sharing academic
information about study topics with classmates and professors, arranging study
groups and asking for help with studies. This paper correspondingly concludes
that despite the potentiality of the social media in the academic sphere, it
cannot go unnoticed that international students use it for other benefits
especially for creating new friendship in and outside Turkey, sharing ideas and
information plus communicating to their families and friends in their home
countries about social and current affairs.

Anahtar Kelimeler

Social Media, Academic life, International Students, Turkey

Kaynakça

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