What Drives Nursing Students’ Social Media-Related Decisions in their Learning Practices? A Survey of an Ontario School of Nursing

Abstract

Social media can provide a tool for nursing students to consolidate their formal and informal learning experiences. The objective of this study was to explore what drives nursing students’ decisions to use social media in their formal and informal learning. This study surveyed 220 nursing students at one Ontario School of Nursing. IBM SPSS (v. 24) was used to calculate frequency counts, Chi-Square Tests for Independence, and Spearman Correlations. A modified directed content analysis was conducted on the open-ended response data. Numerous drivers affect nursing students’ decisions to use social media for learning purposes. These include: 1) their nursing programs; 2) their professors’ attitudes towards social media; 3) their age and perceived levels of experience using social media; 4) the convenience of accessing learning content online; and 5) barriers like privacy, quality and reliability of social media-based learning content, and the potential for distraction. As a result of these findings, there is a strong rationale to further explore the ways in which social media can be used in both formal and informal nursing education.

Keywords

• social media
• nursing students
• decision drivers
• motivations
• teaching
• learning