A Study on The Use of Social Media of Open Education System Students: The Example of AofAnadolum

Abstract

In Turkey, the most widely used as a social networking platform Facebook is one of the medium among college students in which they interact with each other. The use and gratification approach assessed for communication researches for the first time in the early 1960s; it is an approach that advocates users are conscious participants, focusing on the question “what are people doing with the media?” rather than the question “what is the media doing to people”, emphasizing that users are active. That is to say, according to the use and gratification theory, users are not volunteering because of communication necessary. According to the use and gratification theory, users are not volunteering because of communication necessary. In this research, it was aimed to examine the social media environment of AofAnadolum which is the institutional Facebook page of Anadolu University Open Education System in the context of use and gratification approach. This study was carried out by descriptive scanning method. The datas are limited from the “page statistics” section provided by Facebook between February 3, 2016 and February 28, 2017. In this framework, the use of the social media account of the Open Education system was examined in terms of various variables that the demographic characteristics of the followers, the change in the usage situation and the emotional reactions of the followers to the sharing were tried to be determined. Results shows that, institutions aim of using social media platform is informing, followers use it more for information and support. A very large proportion of followers are interested in the exams and the sharing of questions and reacting them.

Keywords

• açık ve uzaktan öğrenme, sosyal medya, uzaktan öğrenen, açıköğretim sistemi