The Role of Social Media in Enhancing Interactive Learning as Baseline Data for Policy Brief

Abstract

Social media has been in the academic world during a very short span, having transformed teaching and learning paradigms globally. There is international need for empirical scrutiny on pedagogical value of social media in higher education sector. The study aimed to show how social media help teachers and students in interactive learning by enhancing engagement and participation, motivation and interest, as well as creativity and critical thinking. Though the integration of social media platforms into educational settings is popular, there has been limited research that contextually investigates how demographic and professional variables shape perceptions of its pedagogical value when integrated within a formal classroom implementation. The results showed that teachers are mainly young female adult graduate students with sufficient teaching experience, who have frequently integrated social media in their instruction but use YouTube as the main teaching platform. Likewise, the group of students, primarily young adolescent females from economically limited but secure families, access media frequently and identify YouTube as their primary source of study. Where teachers rated social media maximally on learner motivation and interest, students ranked its contribution most highly in terms of creativity and critical thinking, but both groups had low perceptions related to engagement and participation. The results also showed that perceptions of teachers differed with teaching experience, social media usage (frequency) and exposure to training, while those of students differed mostly in the degree (level) of their social media utilization. These findings demonstrate the necessity of technological fluency and ongoing professional growth to leverage the pedagogical strength of digital tools. When used intelligently in the context of instruction, social media has the potential to become a transformative educational tool according to the study. Therefore, teachers should employ digital learning strategies that are collaborative and gamified as well as creativity-based, whereas educational leaders should provide differentiated training programs and set institutional policy guidelines to facilitate systematic social media integration in services and preserve innovative, learner-centered instructional practices.