An Empirical Study on Social Media usage by College Students in Coimbatore, India

Abstract

Information and Communication Technology has widened the process of communication, and it also has remarkable impact on education and learning. Like coin, it also has two faces- it ushers with the negative and positive impacts. ICT has a clear impact on the students’ knowledge, attitude and skill. Apart from traditional classroom teaching, ICT provides a virtual learning atmosphere where the learners can enhance experience as it would enable technology mediated learning among teachers and students. Mobile phone and social media usage has become inevitable in today’s life. Digital natives and the omnipresence of smartphones, ipads and portable laptop computers made multimedia teaching aids more user friendly convenient (anytime, anywhere learning).  Apart from traditional learning, these social media provides a platform for innovative and collaborative learning experience which helps the learns to grasp the content easily. The aim of the present study is to measure the social media usage among college students in Coimbatore. A survey was conducted among 507 college students from Coimbatore were chosen through multistage stratified random sampling technique. The demographic variables are—age, gender and educational qualification. The dependent variables—Time spent on social media per day, Time spent on social media during weekdays, Time spent on social media during weekends. Further result states that gender influences the amount of time spent on social media during weekdays. There is no difference with respect to age and educational qualification towards their usage of social media.