Social Media–Based Learning Communities and Academic Performance in Higher Education

Abstract

The presence of digital technologies in higher education is becoming more and more integrated, and it has altered the ways students communicate, cooperate, and study academic materials. The advent of social media based learning communities has turned out as an interactive mode of learning that goes beyond the conventional classrooms through its ability to facilitate communication, peer support, and collaborative knowledge sharing. The paper reviews how involvement in social media-based learning communities, student engagement and academic performance relate among university students. The quantitative cross-sectional design was employed to gather information by interviewing 300 higher education students using a structured questionnaire. To test the proposed relationships, statistical analysis, and descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, and structural equation modeling were performed. The results indicate the engagement of social media learning communities has a positive and significant impact on student engagement and academic performance. It can also be seen that student engagement has a very strong positive impact on the academic performance, which emphasizes that is one of the key mechanisms of the digital learning environments to improve academic performance. These findings implicate that the intentional implementation of social media can be useful in collaborative learning, enhance an academic engagement, and enhance student performance. In the study, the researchers highlight the need to consider incorporating learning communities that are based on the use of social media in higher learning institutions to achieve interactive and student-based learning experiences.