Investigating the Role of Social Media on Student Engagement and Authentic Learning during Post COVID-19

1. Introduction

The ultimate purpose of student engagement during the post COVID-19 is sustainable academic success. Academic success has become a threat and educational organizations expect ubiquitous learning platforms to boost the learning through effective engagement of the students. The earlier supremacy of emerging technological advancement has contributed to the academic field as being vital learning tool while supporting the students, teachers and learners facilitating the personalized learning process and information access as well as engaging students improve the skills and encourage socializing through social media platform. As a matter of fact, there has been many researchers who stated the great influence of social media and social interaction among learners and e-learning authenticity concerning academic perspective. Barton et al. (2021) has come up with an assessment of social media impacts on student learning and exploration of new sites of education in online platform. The study found that joined students in the online courses have been engaged with social interaction, earned better scores in academic performances and diverse outcome from learning. Hosen et al. (2021) highlights in the research that influence of social media in the education has contributed to knowledge formation and social media introduced many analytics tool to engage the students for obtaining scores in online courses. Student engagement in the online courses demonstrates the participation to fulfil the academic contents and activities by interacting within community. Therefore, student engagement requires the e-learning tool and assistance of social media for learning and achieving higher education Zheng et al. (2021).

This chapter sheds light on university student engagement and learning on a special focus on Post COVID-19 by answering the following research questions:

• 1.

  How does student engagement affect the authentic learning task during the post COVID-19?

• 2.

  Under what conditions this association will fluctuate when students have low or high lack of attention during the post COVID-19?

2. Theoretical Background

Learning through social media and exploring the ideas with different sources have intrinsically been increased amongst students. Although the social media platforms have been introduced a many years back, yet after pandemic outbreak of Covid-19, the process of student’s engagement of learning have contributed to higher achievement (Lacka et al. 2021). By the studies of researchers, different theories and behaviors for understanding the learning process and application of different educational platforms in authentic practice are explained through a framework which is theory of planned behavior. The behaviors towards social media have been created after being habituated with the program (Rana et al., 2019). Students who have been engaged with social media and platform for the purpose of study and collecting materials, it demonstrates their perceived behavioral facts and social human practice. Forming any decisions by the learners to engage in the study or practice may lead to engaging in that behavior that envisage the social behavioral pattern of that individual. In this research study, the theoretical framework on two theories has been developed to establish the cause and effect relationship among social engagement, perspective, post COVID behavior, learners’ intentions and their adoptions towards social media platform for study. The broad framework of TAM by researcher David and TPB by Ajzen have explained the social attitudes and forces which implies human behavior (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1980; Rana et al., 2019).