Course engagement online

Using online social networking to improve learning is often confused with social networking for personal and social reasons, states Gerry White in DERN. . Social networks in education can be usefully deployed to increase student engagement and improve learning, especially where a focus on discussion-led learning and student engagement with course material are incorporated into a course. Social networking to enhance student engagement requires innovatory approaches to course-work and consistent staff participation in the online activities. An exciting and innovative approach that utilised social networking and measured student engagement has been described in a paper Beyond marks: new tools to visualise student engagement via social networking which can be found in the open online journal Research in Learning Technology. The paper is refreshing because it demonstrates how course leaders can innovatively use social networking services to engage students in the content and also to assess student performance. Although Facebook is a very well-known and used global social networking service, the researchers have used Friendfeed because of its capacity for non-reciprocal subscriptions that link other participants. The researchers analysed Friendfeed logs and graphically showed the networking clusters of student activity. In addition, the researchers codified and examined online student contributions and gathered student feedback via a questionnaire. As a part of their course-work, students were required to make regular significant online academic contributions reflecting on the content as distinct from engaging in social or personal discussions for which they deferred to Facebook. The researchers were also the course leaders of this inventive approach to engaging students, in a ten week science course. Students could submit status updates, comments, questions about the course and shared links but to quality for credit, external links had to be ‘accompanied by a short commentary explaining how and why it [was] relevant to academic study’ (p. 3). Significant reflective comments on the course content or commentary added to discussion threads were also given assessment credit. The researchers noted that ‘females make more significantly contributions than males’ (p. 4) but that ‘typical male students tend to be strategically focussed on meeting assessment criteria’ (p. 5). However, these statistics indicated the behaviour of the entire cohort rather than individual students. Interestingly, a male student ‘made the highest number of academically-relevant comments’ (p. 5). The researchers deployed a number of research methods for analysing who was talking to whom, what they were talking about and why they were talking as they were. The analysis revealed that three communities of students formed: a very active group that interacted with staff, a smaller group that chatted amongst themselves and a medium sized group that interacted with the whole group but remained on the periphery of the main discussion (p. 7). The researchers clearly demonstrated that to inform educational practices, popular social networks can be deployed as a part of course-work, although the educational activities need to be carefully designed, so that they can be closely related to the course-work. In the science course that was analysed, staff participated in the online social networking activities and led discussions. There is a suggestion that where teaching staff are engaged in student networks that the networks may become higher performing activities. Beyond marks: new tools to visualise student engagement via social networking is a demonstration of successfully using social networks in which ‘student peer networks leverage academic input for maximum engagement’ and for ‘more subtle and effective ways for educators to measure and guide student engagement with academic learning’ (p. 12). This research introduces a successful new method for course leaders that makes use of digital technologies. Beyond marks: new tools to visualise student engagement via social networking is compelling reading for course leaders. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Gerry White is Principal Research Fellow: Teaching & Learning using Digital Technologies, Australian Council for Educational Research This article was first published on the Digital Education Research Network (DERN) Read the full article on DERN (free registration required) Photo: flickr / Jeffery Turne