EDUCATORS AND SOCIAL MEDIA: LEARNING MOTIVATORS IN CREATIVE MEDIA COURSES

This paper investigates the relationship between educators’ affinity, and students’ motivation to learn with the support of social media. This research aims to enhance the educator’s role in encouraging students’ motivation in a creative media classroom as students strive to fulfill academic achievement—creating their media project. Creative media project requires students to undergo a long process of developing ideas, solving problems, and receiving feedback. Therefore, active interaction with educators is critical for the learning process. In a traditional creative media course, communication between educators and students happens in the studio, where students learn in a studio-based learning environment. However, with the rise of social media, this communication in studio-based learning can be enhanced and supplemented in cyberspace. In higher education, social media has become more common, changing educator-student interactions, breaking social barriers to build interpersonal relationships, and thus having a huge impact on students’ motivation to learn. Through social media, both educators and students can build a relationship and foster a positive learning experience through informal and active dialogue sessions. Educators’ availability and approachability on social media influence a student’s learning experience and motivation. Hence, this study used action research project to enhance and improve a communication channel between teachers and students, who have engaged utilizing a designated Facebook group for two semesters. Action research allows educators and students to collaborate on the projects with an eye toward improving the learning experience. This paper discusses the findings from the action research project and identifies how educators can use social media to increase students’ intrinsic motivation.