Table 4 Participants’ reasons for using or not using social media in support of their formal and informal learning

Credibility and relevance of sources

I think sometimes, again, depending on the pages out there and what can be followed, I think my biggest thing would be the accuracy. So, for somebody that is very much using this for study purposes, um, for my schooling right now as well as the NCLEX coming up, a big thing for me was, um, how, how true is this information and how reliable is this? (P9)

It really is a positive experience just because I’m able to critically think about something and be like, you know, is this even, you know, you see this random article on Facebook or YouTube or whatever and it’s like, does this really make sense? Is this really a legitimate source? Like, and it’s just second nature to be able to filter that kind of uncredible source out whereas again, people who haven’t grown up with that mindset would have a more difficult time probably (P6)

Professors and professionalism

I’m not very, I guess out front, at least for the Instagram page with kind of what’s going on in that sense, um, just because I do know there are some professionalism bodies that do kind of regulate and kind of watch what is being posted, specifically since I am still trying to get into the world of nursing, so I’m very conscious of that (P9)

I try to keep social media and my profession kind of separate. Maybe once in a while I might post something, but it’s very rare. Like, I really ty to keep that stuff separate…. I find that nursing is a reputable profession. I really take pride in my job and, yeah. Not that I’m a party animal or anything, don’t get me wrong (P8)

Like, we always get warned about, we can’t break confidentiality so we can never say something on any social media platform that discloses information about our patients or clinical experiences. Like, they said that we can talk about oh, I had a really good day at clinical but obviously that’s excluding everything about our patient and what we actually have done, and they warned us about getting expelled or anything, getting kicked out of the program. So, they obviously provide us with that precautionary teaching but other than that, there’s not really, we don’t have guidelines other than that (P6)

Convenience and accessibility

It’s an easy platform to share from. The interface usually works really well. It’s really not hard to go onto Facebook and actually instead of emailing someone, instead of logging online and opening my email and going from there, if I already have Facebook open, I just open up messenger and I can just share documents, just drag and click directly into that, it just is super easy, convenient thing to do (P7)

You can’t disconnect from social media so that was one of the other things I’ve often experienced was that social media as a whole, I reach a point where it’s, because of news media or something that’s going on in the world, I just don’t want to deal with it but in order for me to get information for school and communicate with some of my classmates, I need that Facebook app, um, my account active in order to, you know, to access that (P2)

Engagement and distraction

I think any educational experience would be very beneficial, especially since kind of my generation and the rest going forward, we are very attached to social media so to be able to use that platform to help us learn and to communicate and kind of connect with us on that level since it is something that works well for us and that we are quite connected to (P9)

You know when you kind of start drifting off in class and you just open up your browser and oh, there’s Facebook or oh, I’m just going to casually scroll through Instagram and it’s a distraction for sure. Or, even when you’re like, on campus between classes and you’re like, ‘oh, I’m going to finish this assignment’ and then you end up wasting an hour on Twitter or something (P6)