Acceptance and Usage of Social Media by Gen Z Students as a learning source

Social media has become a tool for reshaping the education system these days. It plays an important role in disseminating information to parents, teachers and students and thus empowering them. Today Gen Z students are easily adopted to new trends and technological changes .This paper explores the acceptance level of social media by Gen z ,their usage for the purpose of learning. The main aim of this paper is to find out the important components that students look for in accepting and using social media for learning. This paper considers the UTAUT model developed by Venketesh et al for the study. Questionnaire developed were based on the UTAUT model ,which was administered to around 205 Gen Z students of engineering colleges at Tirupathi. Further ,factor analysis was run to extract the factors relevant followed by multiple regression. The three main predictors of the study were identified as performance expectancy, effort expectancy and facilitating conditions, which showed significant impact on the behavioral intention of students in using social media as a learning source. Futher, the study also tested the impact of behavioral intention on the use behavior of Gen Z and the found that behavioral intention leads to use of social media for leaning.