8. Conclusion
This study examined the actual use, the motivations, the potentials and obstacles of teaching with Social Media in higher education. Despite its limitations, it emerges that Social Media are playing a marginal role in academic life. A combination of factors, including some socio-demographic variables, institutional issues, pedagogical views, pragmatic reasons and values, seem to be slowing down the adoption of Social Media in current teaching practices. As far as the socio-demographic variables are concerned, the age and the scientific discipline were found as the most relevant predictors of use of Social Media for teaching. However, further research would be necessary to better understand the role of age. Indeed, results on this variable were not always consistent with results relating to other variables like seniority. In some way, from our study, we cannot conclude that being younger necessarily leads to adopt Social Media, especially those based on high levels of reputation in a professional field (Kirkup, 2010; Manca & Ranieri, 2016). Also the association between the decision to adopt Social Media for teaching and the scientific discipline should be further explored, notably to better understand this association in relationship to specific motivations and uses. In an attempt to explain the different behaviours across the different academic disciplines, we claimed that teachers in Humanities and Arts plus Social Sciences are more prone to use Social Media for their pedagogical affordances than for finding relevant teaching content. A series of clues brought us to this conclusion, but further research on teaching uses in specific academic fields would increase our understanding of how teachers are using or not Social Media for teaching. In addition, though the academic title did not show having a significant impact on the decision to embrace Social Media, further studies on the weight of this variable would be beneficial considering the importance that academic identity and role have on faculty members' practices with Social Media (Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2013). When coming to obstacles such as cultural resistance, traditional visions of instruction, lack of technical support and perceived risks, coherently with other studies (Brown, 2012; Gao et al., 2012; Manca & Ranieri, 2013, 2015; Rogers-Estable, 2014; Scott, 2013), we found that they are discouraging academics from embracing social platforms and adopting more participatory approaches. In this situation, institutions should reconsider their role in providing support to academic staff. Research has stressed how many teachers require to be sustained by academic administrators, provided with technical and pedagogical guidance and support. Top-down approaches with institution management advising and guiding faculty members would increase their web self-efficacy and compensate their lack of digital competences. At the same time, bottomup approaches, such as identification and sharing of creative teaching practices also suggested by students, could provide the incentive to re-think implicit pedagogies and modify traditional ways of teaching. This would open the way to reconsider certain cultural resistance and shift the focus from unconditional closure towards innovation to more flexible attitudes, which look on Social Media as cultural resources that can be used to improve teaching and learning in contemporary universities.
