Influencers educativos en TikTok: una exploración de su incidencia en la motivación hacia la educación.

Abstract

This research is an exploration of the incidence of motivation towards education on the consumption of the content of educational influencers in TikTok, entering also to the measurement of the factors that motivate university students of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Technical University of Machala to acquire new knowledge with this digital platform. As for the theoretical foundation, we inquired about the concept and the characteristics considered in other studies on the now called influencers and why they are called educational, in addition we delved into the theory of self-determination since it presents three types of motivation, intrinsic, extrinsic and amotivation. The methodology of this study has a quantitative approach and a descriptive scope where a scale adapted to the consumption of educational content in TikTok called Academic Motivation Scale was applied, evaluated with the Likert scale, which is structured by 7 dimensions of 4 items each. Once the results were obtained, we opted for a reliability analysis with Cronbach's alpha, where we satisfactorily obtained a .978 that within the range qualifies as "Excellent", followed by a descriptive analysis with each of the questions both demographic and by dimensions of the scale, in addition to identify the significant relationship between educational influencers and motivating factors of consumption of students, a chi-square test was performed, obtaining a value of p < 0.05 which means that it does have a significant relationship. The results show that women are the ones who mostly consume educational content on TikTok and with respect to the total demographic group of our sample suggests that this tool potentially affects the training and academic growth at present, also with the scale it was concluded that a pronounced percentage of students are motivated mostly intrinsically showing that they explore new knowledge for their own good with autonomy. The conclusions and suggestions offer valuable information for creators of educational content in the current era, both to contribute to personal and professional growth, in addition to the identification of motivational factors that affect the consumption of content, there is also valuable information for future research.