TY - JOUR TT - Social Media in the Academic Life of International Students in Turkey: A Survey Study AU - Muyıngo, Rajab İdd AU - Kırık, Ali Murat PY - 2017 DA - December Y2 - 2017 JF - Uluslararası Kültürel ve Sosyal Araştırmalar Dergisi JO - IntJCSS PB - Mutlu TÜRKMEN WT - DergiPark SN - 2458-9381 SP - 205 EP - 218 VL - 3 IS - 2 KW - Social Media KW - Academic life KW - International Students KW - Turkey N2 - As social media becomes the idealspace of sharing information in a simple and convenient way, it continues toattract numerous scholarly studies. This paper investigates the peculiarity ofsocial media in the academic life of international students in Turkey, with anaim of ascertaining the social media tools used by international students.Secondly is to scrutinize the academic purposes of social media usage among internationalstudents in Turkey. The third objective is to determine the academic benefitsattained by international students in the usage of social media. This study wasinclined in the Uses and Gratification theory, the researcher considered arandomly selected sample of international students in Istanbul City. Due to thenature of this study both qualitative and quantitative approaches were applied.Thus semi- structured interviews and questionnaires were used to get data on arandomly selected sample. Observantly, social media platforms found vital inthe academic life of international students included; YouTube, Facebook,WhatsApp and Twitter. In the same way, findings indicates that internationalstudents frequently use social media for more than twice a week to interactwith their course mates as an encouragement for studying outside classroom.Remarkably, international students benefit from social media as they use YouTube to watch educational video clips on lectures delivered from otheruniversities to widen on their understanding on a particular subject. Equally,Facebook and Whatsapp were purposely for instant messaging, sharing academicinformation about study topics with classmates and professors, arranging studygroups and asking for help with studies. This paper correspondingly concludesthat despite the potentiality of the social media in the academic sphere, itcannot go unnoticed that international students use it for other benefitsespecially for creating new friendship in and outside Turkey, sharing ideas andinformation plus communicating to their families and friends in their homecountries about social and current affairs. CR - Aghaee, N.M. (2010) “Social Media Use in Academia: Campus Students Perceptions of How Using Social Media Supports Educational Learning”, Magister thesis, Uppsala University, Department of Computer and System Science, Uppsala, Sweden. CR - Anabel, Q-H.; Alyson, Y. 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