Modeling educational usage of Facebook

The purpose of this study is to design a structural model explaining how users could utilize Facebook for educational purposes. In order to shed light on the educational usage of Facebook, in constructing the model, the relationship between users' Facebook adoption processes and their educational use of Facebook were included indirectly while the relationship between users' purposes in using Facebook and the educational usage of Facebook was included directly. In this study, data is collected from Facebook users with an online survey developed by the researchers. The study group consists of 606 Facebook users whose answers were examined by using a structural equation model. The analyses of the 11 observed and 3 latent variables provided by the model showed that 50% of educational usage of Facebook could be explained by user purposes along with the adoption processes of Facebook. It was also found that Facebook adoption processes could explain 86% of all user purposes. Finally, while Facebook adoption processes explained 45% of its educational usage, it could explain 50% of variance in educational usage of Facebook when the user purposes were added into the analyses. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.