THE CHALLENGES OF SOCIAL MEDIA RESEARCH IN ONLINE LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the critical challenges in social media research in the educational field and some current initiatives in addressing them. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with thirteen researchers using social media as the data source in their educational research. The study revealed four concerns that must be addressed before embarking on research involving social networking sites, including the volume of data, accessing data, the extent of data reliability and validity and some ethical concerns regarding collecting data from social media platforms. This study suggested that the new digital icons people use in social media communication to convey their emotions are essential and must be considered when analyzing data. Also, it is recommended to theorize the analysis of these social media-related icons (or language). They contain a wealth of information related to the meaning of online learning conversations.