Efficacy of Social Networking Sites for Sustainable Education in the Era of COVID-19: A Systematic Review
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The topic of the paper is important and up-to-date. The paper is structured well, you elaborated methodology very well and discussed the research findings in light of important educational concepts such as cooperative/colaborative learning, self-directive learning, argumentative knowledge construction, peer support etc.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear authors,
Thank you very much for your efforts writing this paper.
This manuscript studies the best practices and the features in Social Networking Sites that could be used to successfully deploy or improve eLearning practices in the era of COVID-19. The topic of the paper is interesting and relevant.
The study systematically reviewed the existing literature on eLearning using SNSs and illustrated how the current challenges could be addressed by transporting evidenced practices of eLearning with SNSs to the era of COVID-19.
The systematic search was conducted across four electronic databases from 2011 to date and included journal articles published with English titles.
Prisma flow diagram of the systematic literature review has been applied, including initially 1955 papers. Finally most relevant 31 studies were considered.
Results show the descriptive analysis of trends and status of the study on SNS in education and summarize previous publications from the point of view of participants, research design, most researched SNSs and key findings of the previous studies.
The most relevant add value of this investigation is the visualization, in only one table, of most relevant information extracted from the selected articles.
The following comments aim to improve the manuscript quality further. There are a few issues that I recommend addressing:
C1. Abstract includes twice the acronym “SNSs”, what could be unknown by some readers: maybe it would be better to write Social Networking Sites, at least the first time you mention it.
C2. Line 59: Nowadays Google Scholar is one of the most popular scientific papers search engine: please use it or explain why you didn’t use it. Obviously some publications will coincide with those already included in your literature review, but maybe you will find new papers suitable to be included in your research.
C3. Line 60: The terms “social networks” or “social network” are not included in the used research terms: please use both terms or explain why not.
C4. Line 66: It would be good to provide examples of best practices applying the Prisma flow diagram of the systematic literature review, if possible in a similar field of study.
C5. Line 71: The inclusion/exclusion criteria is not clear enough, please explain it in-depth.
C6. Line 80: One of the reasons to exclude papers was to be literature reviews (n=14). Taking into consideration that your research is also a literature review, it would be a good idea to explain in the introduction how your research improves previous similar publications and in conclusions to compare your findings with the findings of those literature reviews.
C7. Please discuss your limitations and future research.
I congratulate the authors for this interesting investigation and wish them the most success in their research activities.
Thank you very much for your efforts and for your valuable scientific contribution.
Yours sincerely.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Thank you for this interesting reading. The paper proposes an interesting systematic literature review about 'distance learning'. Anyways, it is not clear in which ways keywords have been identified and the link to the Covid-19 and to the sustainability is too marginal.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 3 Report
Thank you for the clarification, after the review the paper can be considered for publication.
