Improving student engagement through a social media platform

Users of social networking sites can share personal information, connect with other users, upload, tag and share multimedia content (Lockyer & Patterson, 2008). This project investigated the effectiveness of using social networking in a controlled environment using the social networking platform (NING) to increase student engagement in discussion of professional issues. Telecommunication Engineering staff in the Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies used social networking to communicate with students, in addition to the Learning Management System (LMS) that the university provided. Higher education has been slow in adopting social networking technologies into the curriculum (Brady, Holcomb, & Smith, 2010), despite the proliferation of social networking sites such as Facebook. The researchers were interested in understanding and exploring the potential capabilities and pitfalls of the technology. The focus of this project was to explore whether the population of a NING for telecommunication and networking students would assist in increased student engagement and whether academic staff could see any perceived benefits from exploiting the use of social networks and Web 2:0 technologies. We used the NING rather than the University LMS to offer another medium so that we could separate the course materials from the social aspect of student engagement. Since participation in the NING was not compulsory, non-examinable material was posted to encourage and promote topical discussions such as Australia's National Broadband Network. The Telecommunications Engineering staff engaged with the students through the NING by contributing regularly to the forums, uploading pictures, highlighting topics that were of potential interest to students to encourage discussion. The overall goal was to provide students with a broader perspective of their discipline and give them an understanding of the technical and research interests of academic staff. We modelled the skills that we hoped the students would exhibit using social networks (Ozkan & McKenzie, 2008). To evaluate the success of the project, two different questionnaires were administered online using Opinio in the last four weeks of semester to both students and staff. The survey responses were then evaluated to enable quantitative comparisons and draw conclusions. Despite the prediction that the use of social media could lead to increased student engagement with current topics faced by the wider professional community in telecommunication and networking, our trial suggests that this might not be true. Initial engagement was positive with 76 students creating accounts within the system, yet ongoing commitment and active participation was poor. A discussion of why this might be is included in this paper. It is worth noting that lurking, or passive engagement, was quite strong amongst the student members. The outcomes of the pilot trial did not suggest that students actively engaged in the staff directed discussions. Nevertheless, there was considerable evidence of passive engagement, from which we are encouraged to believe that the use of social media paradigms could still be useful in increasing student engagement and participation with wider aspects of their ongoing education.