Social Media Learning Ecosystems: An Educational Analytics Framework for Engagement, Knowledge Co-Creation, and Human Flourishing

Purpose: Social media is now widely used for learning, yet its educational value is often judged through surface-level indicators such as views, reactions, and participation counts. This review develops the Social Learning Value Analytics Framework (SLVAF) to explain how well-designed social-media learning practices may support psychological engagement, digital belonging, knowledge co-creation, and human flourishing. Design/methodology/approach: The article adopts an integrative, theory-building review. It brings together social learning theory, connectivism, self-determination theory, the Community of Inquiry framework, positive psychology, and recent digital-education research. The review organises the literature around inputs, mechanisms, outcomes, and boundary conditions, and translates the synthesis into a testable process model, measurement architecture, and empirical research agenda. Findings: The synthesis suggests that platform activity alone gives an incomplete account of learning value. Educational value is more plausibly understood as a pathway in which relevant learning practices encourage engagement, engagement and belonging support continued participation, and collaborative activity enables knowledge co-creation and broader human development. Psychological safety, digital literacy, inclusive design, ethical participation, and information overload may strengthen or weaken this pathway. Originality/value: The paper contributes an educational analytics perspective that separates visible platform activity from the psychological, social, and knowledge processes through which learning value may develop. SLVAF offers educators, institutions, and researchers a practical structure for programme evaluation while also presenting hypotheses and measurement options for future empirical validation.