التعليم عن بعد وشبکات التواصل الاجتماعى

The educational systems currently witness massive changes on all levels: visions, goals and methods. With continuous growth in social and economic plans of countries and the need for putting such plans into force through high quality educational outcomes, the directions towards developing education and supporting learners are on increase not only for gaining knowledge or gathering information but also for developing the skills prerequisite for mixing with the society. In order to improve the educational production, the educators resort to integrate technology in education and develop the traditional methods in a way that contributes to emergence of newfangled methods such as the distance learning which provides learning opportunities for all society classes with whatever circumstances and multiple needs. Furthermore, this type of learning requires utilizing the modern communication technology and its methods in order to overcome the distance problem between the teacher and the learner like the internet. Internet possesses multiple applications which become pioneering ones in the distance learning field; due to the fact that it constitutes an effective communication method between the teacher and the learner on the one hand and between the learners and his/ her peers on the other hand. In addition the teacher and the learning can obtain feedback from the other partner. Recently, social networks have emerged on the Internet and spread on a large scale internationally. Moreover, such social networks become the most internationally visited sites to the extent that they become the third in order of priority after home and work or school or university for the human to resort to and in his/ her point of view, such social networks are deemed one of the most robust methods of distance learning second generation which determine the cooperative learning and the community participation as a main educational goal together with the behavioral and  cognitive goals in the contemporary educational systems.  Currently, the most important question is as follows: how can learning types be developed to enable the learner to build knowledge in the cooperative learning system where the learner shares such knowledge with other members of the society? Our relationship with the knowledge has changed in this age; because it has shifted from a single perspective providing the knowledge in a narrow template surrounded with restrictions and readymade frameworks to multiple dynamic interactions.  The current paper seeks to identify the impact of using the social networks on the distance learning through shedding much light on the distance learning concepts, distance learning benefits as well as the social networks represented in Facebook, Twitter and Youtube.