Social Media in Higher Education: Integrated Practices, Boundary Negotiations, and Scholarly Communication among selected Educators

The expansion of social media has altered communication across higher education, yet little research examines how educators navigate digital platforms across interconnected professional domains. This qualitative descriptive study explored the self-reported practices and public digital artifacts of 12 purposively selected, digitally active educators from five world regions. Data comprised semi-structured interviews (60–90 minutes) and a corpus of 156 public artifacts (48 microblogging threads, 36 professional-networking posts, 24 webinar recordings, 28 Discord and open-resource channels, and 20 blog entries), gathered through combined participant submission and independent researcher collection. A single researcher analyzed the data using reflexive thematic analysis, and identifiers were removed from all artifacts. Four themes were developed: perceived instructional scaffolding and student participation; decentralized professional learning networks; scholarly communication and perceived research visibility; and boundary maintenance, epistemic noise, and digital risk management. Participants described structured, moderated platform use as supporting low-latency instruction, peer collaboration, and research dissemination, alongside deliberate boundary management in response to context collapse and institutional oversight. Findings reflect educator perceptions only. Student learning outcomes and citation impacts were not measured, and the purposive sample of digitally active educators limits transferability. The study suggests that institutions should treat informal networked practice as legitimate professional development and provide clear, non-punitive guidance on public engagement.