REVIEW ARTICLE SN‐Learning: An exploratory study beyond e‐learning and evaluation of its applications using EV‐SNL framework Akrivi Krouska | Christos Troussas | Maria Virvou Software Engineering Laboratory, Department of Informatics, University of Piraeus, Piraeus, Greece Correspondence Akrivi Krouska, Software Engineering Laboratory, Department of Informatics, University of Piraeus, 80, M. Karaoli & A. Dimitriou St., Piraeus 18534, Greece. Email: akrouska@unipi.gr Abstract Social networks have intruded in human life by providing new technological innovations in a range of fields, including the education. The use of social networks in education has the potential to extend e‐learning and to introduce new forms of tutoring, communication, and collaboration between students and instructors. Thus, e‐learning is the threshold of Social Networking‐based Learning (SN‐Learning). SN‐Learning consists of a new term, introduced in this paper, and involves e‐learning systems with social networking characteristics or learning through social networking platforms. To this direction, the main objective of this paper is to present this new technological advancement emerged nowadays and to evaluate relevant applications of the last decade using our adjusted evaluation framework, EV‐SNL, in order to highlight their strengths and weaknesses regarding digital learning. The major finding is that SN‐Learning systems focus mainly on the incorporation of social features and do not provide yet personalized and adaptive tutoring. This research provides guidelines to computer science researchers on the design and implementa- tion of SN‐Learning platforms using artificial intelligence and modelling techniques. Moreover, it can support teachers of different fields so that they can enhance their instruction with new technologies. There is scope for a lot of improvement. KEYWORDS e-learning, evaluation framework, Facebook, literature review, personalized tutoring, social networks 1 | INTRODUCTION The emergence of Web 2.0 technologies and the proliferation of social media have drastically altered the range and capabilities of the pro- vided web services both in a general way and more specifically in the field of digital education (Abraham & Saini, 2015; Chunyan, Haitao, & Guolin, 2014; Garmendía & Cobos, 2013). The conjunction of advances in software engineering along with the increasing use of por- table devices (mobile, smartphones, tablets), which nowadays are accessible to a large proportion of the population, allow direct access to the Internet and online services in particular, without spatial and/or temporal constraints (Troussas, Virvou, & Alepis, 2014). Alongside these technological developments, there is a remark- able propagation and exploitation of social media, constituting a Web 2.0 innovation that encourages user‐generated content and allows users to share their content among their networks (Zhang, Wang, de Pablos, Tang, & Yan, 2015). Social media technologies are used in a variety of completely diverse fields and activities, including the education, and take on many different forms, including social net- works (Abraham & Saini, 2015; Güler, 2015). The use of social Received: 1 November 2017 Revised: 26 April 2018 Accepted: 13 October 2018 DOI: 10.1111/jcal.12330 J Comput Assist Learn. 2018;1–10. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jcal 1