2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Exploring the Use of Social Media in Engineering Education—Preliminary Findings from a Systematic Literature Review
Presented at Reviewing Methods for Educational Research
Social media is an interactive platform that allows individuals to share their ideas, beliefs, and information to express their thoughts and opinions on different aspects. Social media has been gaining recognition and acceptance in engineering education, and it has been shown to increase student participation, engagement, and learning. To create guidelines for the effective use of social media platforms in engineering education, this theory paper primarily focuses on analyzing the various research studies done in the field by summarizing the different research topics, elements of social media used, and analysis techniques, among others. The articles for this study have been retrieved from various databases, including Scopus, Science Direct, Web of Science, Wiley Online Library, ERIC, IEEE Xplore Library, and Google Scholar. As a part of this literature search, the search phrases used to retrieve articles from these databases are Facebook + Engineering, Instagram + Engineering, and Twitter + Engineering.
The review process involved five distinct steps. Initially, all articles from various databases were gathered and compared to eliminate any duplicates, resulting in a total of 1821 articles. Articles that met the exclusion criteria, such as those published before 2017, articles not focused on engineering, articles in languages other than English, articles with a focus other than Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and work-in-progress articles, were removed from the final list. In the second step, these 1821 articles were screened based on their titles and abstracts to assess their relevance and applicability to the study. Out of these, 65 articles were selected for further consideration. Articles not meeting the relevance and applicability criteria were excluded from the study. In the third step, the remaining 48 articles were screened based on their full text to ensure they met the exclusion criteria. In the fourth step, the 21 articles that remained were critically reviewed to extract the relevant information necessary for the analysis. Information such as research questions, research design, data collection, and data analysis, among others, were retrieved from the articles and consolidated in a separate file. Finally, this consolidated information was further analyzed and synthesized to generate observations and trends. The findings indicate that Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have been used as a learning environment in a few engineering disciplines, including software engineering, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, and electronics engineering. More than half of the sampled articles used quantitative research designs and descriptive statistics for data analysis, and Facebook emerged as the most preferred choice of researchers among the sampled articles.
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