Investigating factors affecting loyalty to learning through social media

Abstract

Background and Objectives: Today, with the development of mass communication tools and computers, the penetration and expansion of the Internet in various areas of life is undeniable. One of the most pervasive phenomena that has emerged on the Internet in recent years is the emergence of social media. Social media has affected social and economic life. The spread of social media has attracted the attention of various segments of society, including educational administrators. From the perspective of educational administrators, social media provides unique opportunities for teaching and learning. Social media is a group of Internet-based applications that rely on the basics of Web technology to create and share user-generated content. Social media, in addition to the entertainment aspect, is used to access and disseminate learning information, and their use to achieve educational goals has been studied in detail. One of the applications of social media is learning, in which the learning process takes place through knowledge sharing. With the development of social media, proper and efficient use of it is inevitable. Social media is a good tool for learning. In order to have a better and more advanced society, special attention should be given to the role of learning through social media. One of the issues that promotes the development of learning through social media is the loyalty of users to learning through social media. Therefore, in the present study, the antecedents of learning loyalty through social media have been studied. Methods: The present study is a descriptive study in terms of objective and applied in nature. The data gathering instrument was a questionnaire and the population of this research was the users of the Telegram group of Qom IT Centre. In the current study, convenience sampling was used to collect 364 questionnaires. Data were analyzed using SPSS and LISREL software. Findings: The findings of the study showed that more than 95% of the statistical population were university educated and all the research hypotheses were confirmed. Conclusion: The results of the research show that two indicators for measurement of learning loyalty through social media (behavioral intention to continue using and willingness to recommend to others) are affected by satisfaction, and satisfaction is also affected by self-efficacy of learning and interest to learning through social media. The results also showed that the cognitive disability of the Internet has disadvantages and causes a decrease in self-efficacy and interest in learning through social media. When a person feels the self-efficacy of learning through social media, they find interest and satisfaction in learning through it. Also, the interest in learning through social media leads to the satisfaction of learning through it, and finally, if a person finds satisfaction in learning, they have a behavioral tendency to continue using social media and a tendency to advise others.Through the above, the development of social media as a learning tool is possible, and this brings many benefits, including reducing learning costs, reducing learning time, expanding learning fairly, and improving learning. ===================================================================================== COPYRIGHTS ©2020 The author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, as long as the original authors and source are cited. No permission is required from the authors or the publishers. =====================================================================================

Keywords

• learning
• social media
• loyalty
• self-efficacy
• behavioral intention