Building an evaluation framework for social media-enabled collaborative learning environments (SMECLEs)

Social media is an emerging topic in information systems (IS) research, but has quickly been adopted by practice in many areas including marketing, finance and customer service. Another area seeing increased adoption is learning, where social media platforms are being appropriated to build collaborative learning environments, which can be referred to as social media-enabled collaborative learning environments (SMECLE). However, it is not evident whether these social media platforms can enable collaborative learning; therefore, the purpose of this research is to build an evaluation framework to explore whether social media platforms enable collaborative learning. To achieve this, the paper identifies the social media and collaborative learning constructs that are necessary to build such an evaluation framework. Finally, three illustrative examples of how to utilise the evaluation framework are presented, further exposing the rules of its use. The framework is of value to educators who may be deciding to develop SMECLEs or want to provide themselves an appropriate means of evaluating the effectiveness of social media platforms in enabling collaborative learning.