International Journal of Education and Social Science (IJESS)

Blackboard, one of the most powerful learning management systems emerged in 1997(Sylvester, 2011). It has been effectively employed in education. Unfortunately, many universities in developing countries cannot afford such a learning management system for some reason. In an effort to provide these countries with the benefits offered by technological instruction, this paper will review literature from different studies on how social media sites can provide instructors and students with many of the features of proprietary course management systems. The paper will briefly report the history and the types of social media sites. It will study in details the reasons why social media sites are classified into six types and the characteristics of social media sites which facilitate interaction between the instructor and students, among the students themselves, and between the students and materials. Finally, the paper also provides a classification scheme of common social media sites for educators.