Abstract
Social media use in higher education is becoming increasingly common. The tools available to the educator are sophisticated and numerous, and it can be challenging to know which ones to use and how to use them to best effect. We begin by asking what we want to achieve in educating our students and how social media may enable this. We argue that Christensen’s “jobs-to-be-done” theory can help clarify faculty requirements and the needs of students. We then explore connectivism an example of a pedagogy that takes explicit account of our digitally connected world.
We move on to consider the practical issues confronting the use of social media for educational purposes, including the issue of boundaries, which are of importance in setting expectations and standards of behavior. We explore factors that can affect engagement with social online learning and behaviors such as lurking and suggest ways in which this can be understood and mitigated. We discuss the darker side of social media, such as trolling, and how it might be dealt with. Social media has the potential to set faculty-student relations on a more equal footing, and we look at how co-creation can be used to leverage this and drive learning.
Our final section examines practical challenges to implementing a social media platform as part of a module or course. We make recommendations on how to approach this and indicate how further research may help us gain a deeper understanding and develop solutions for some of the problems we highlight.
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We would like to thank Amber Moorcroft for useful discussions regarding the content of the chapter.
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Rengasamy, E., Cole, D. (2022). Social Online Learning: Leveraging Social Media and Web-Based Co-creation to Drive Learning. In: Witchel, H.J., Lee, M.W. (eds) Technologies in Biomedical and Life Sciences Education. Methods in Physiology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95633-2_14
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