Assessing Educational Applications of Virtual - Social Networks and Its Social Harms as Perceived by Agricultural Students (the Case of College of Agriculture, Zanjan University)

The purpose of this study was to study the educational applications of virtual social networks and their social harms from the perspective of agricultural students. Descriptive-correlation method with survey technic was used in this study. A questionnaire was used to collect the data. The face validity of the questionnaire was approved by a panel of academic experts. Pre-test and calculating Cronbach's alpha coefficients were used to measure the reliability and the value of this coefficient was higher than 0.75. Agricultural students in Zanjan University formed the population of the study (N=1102) and samples were selected using stratified random sampling (n=150). Results showed that educational applications of virtual social networks were summarized in four factors including: teaching notification and exchange of lesson content and teaching assignments, interactive communication of conferences and research resources, Interact with classmates and share news and educational videos, and searching of student affairs and sport and exchange of educational material between students. These factors explained 63.65% of the total variance. Results of confirmatory factor analysis of harms of virtual social networks showed that these harms were summarized in six factors including: insulting ethnicities and religions and spreading verbal intolerance, reducing public confidence and expanding fake identity, waste of time and academic failure, publishing false information and increase unhealthy relationship, reduce in person communication and publishing immoral material. Considering the considerable amount of time spent by students in virtual social networks, regardless of whether it is positive or negative, it is necessary to plan this capacity for optimal and useful training.