Private open source social networking media for education

Abstract

Social Networking Media is one of the most growing platforms used for direct communication, and for collaboration between many users worldwide across geographical, political or economic borders. Universities are becoming more depending on such platforms for E-learning. Nowadays public social networking media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Blogs, etc., are wide used at the universities. Each university has at least a page on Facebook, and a Twitter account. Although the wide spread of these platforms among universities, they still prefer to depend on Private Social Networking Media instead of public ones especially for the education purpose. The persistence of the open source application, their efficiencies, and their ease of use leaded the universities to depend more and more on them. Finding a free private social network platform for education is a hard work, but essential for universities. In fact free platform is needed to minimize the budget, and the private platform to control the content of the social network. The goal of our study is to find a free private open source social networking media that can be used at universities for education purpose.