Social Media in Collaborative Learning: A Systematic Literature Review

Adopting social media in Collaborative learning demarcates a boundary of novel pedagogy. Collaborative learning is a behaviour that can affect the teacher's and learners' cognition and, hence, pedagogical psychology. The concept can be used to facilitate a wider remote community for teaching and learning purposes. Thus, it has brought up the lacuna of a study explaining the empirical research ecosystems associated with the topic area. The main objectives of the study are (1) to investigate the existing knowledge landscape on social, collaborative learning with social media and (2) to areas where empirical research is lacking. The PRISMA guidelines followed the systematic literature review method. Scholarly journal articles published between 1980-2023 were queried through the Lens.org database, where 63 articles were selected for the final review. Bibliometric analysis was conducted using Biblioshiny and RStudio, and the VOSviewer package was used to conduct network visualization and density visualization analysis. Results revealed a relationship between social media adoption and collaborative learning. Existing knowledge was mapped and described using visualization maps to capture the extent of the existing research conducted and highlight the links between each article used in the analysis. A new qualitative tool, Word Cloud, highlighted the study areas. It was found that there could be a relationship between the psychological aspects of teachers and learners while adopting social media into pedagogy. Thus, if available, further research needs to be conducted to identify and regulate such issues. Research areas lacking empirical research must be addressed with future possible research since there is a trending incline in research. The same systematic review can be repeated with at least two research databases to minimize the change of missing possible articles in the review. However, pilot studies, at pure and applied levels, need to be conducted prior to the practice of social media adoption in collaborative learning, and they must be conducted through policy background.