Using Social Media to Encourage Learning:

Extra considerations in the 6 Steps to Blended

LearningDr Fiona Handley, CLT

Marion Curdy, IS

Aims of the session

� To discover what you need to take into consideration when planning to use social media, as part of the 6 Steps to Blended Learning.

Internal University of Brighton social media• Discussion Board, Forum & Blog tools in studentcentral• EduBlogs• studentfolio

External social media:

Social media: growing ubiquity� More than 1.2 billion people use Facebook regularly according to

numbers released in October 2013; a recent report by Business Insider reported 2.7 billion people — almost 40% of the world population — regularly use social media.

� The top 25 social media platforms worldwide share 6.3 billion accounts among them. Educators, students, alumni, and the general public routinely use social media to share news about scientific and other developments.

� The impact of these changes in scholarly communication and on the credibility of information remains to be seen, but it is clear that social media has found significant traction in almost every education sector.

NMC Horizon Report for Higher Education 2014

Planning on using social media?

The 6 Key Steps to Blended Learning

1. Identify the learning objectives

2. Look at the curriculum to decide what is best face-to-face and what is best online

3. Consider the integration and relationship between face-to-face and eLearning

4. Develop the most appropriate eLearning activities to achieve the learning objectives

5. Decide how you will assess these activities

6. Choose the most appropriate technology

Social media for learning?

� Students are familiar with it

� Usually well designed, engaging, easy and fun to use

� Social media allows lots of people to access and share information, and comment on it, at the same time (synchronously) or not (asynchronously)

� Breaks down barriers between formal and informal learning i.e. promotes lifelong learning

� Important tool for students to engender change in the wider world

Social media for learning?

� But

� Social media not created for education

� Digital footprints – all online activities leave a trail

� Skills lag and rapid evolution

� Needs to be accessible to everyone

Extra issues to consider in using social media

� Preparation - student briefing and technical set up time and effort � You may need to factor in the time for students to get a

good proportion of the class set up with a social media accounts such Twitter/Instagram/Pinterest

� An induction session at the beginning of the module can cover this kind of technical set up (as well as set ground rules for appropriate behavior etc.), but it may not be worth doing all this if you’re only going to use the social media for one short activity.

Learning potential

� Use the strengths of the media - some social media tools are really just for sharing or curating information. However this may be what you need to share the findings of challenging face-to-face learning activities

� There is more online learning potential in tools that allow:� students to work together in ways beyond just posting

comments and content� staff to give feedback in a variety of ways� staff to track student activities and engagement

Digital footprint

� All online activities will leave a footprint, by using external social media you won’t have control of that data and it is harder to guarantee its future use.

� Students may have justifiable concerns about using external social media. Be prepared for students to work in groups so that students who are not comfortable setting up their own social media account can still participate, or move the activity to an internal social media.

Ownership and accessto data

� Consider what kind of data your activity will leave on social media – by using external social media you won’t have control of that data and can’t guarantee its future use.

� Anything that may need to be referred to again in the future, or contains personal information, or may not present the University or the work of students in the best light should use internal social media. So that may rule out summatively assessed activities.

� Further to this, external social media has varying degrees of access to ‘back-of-house’ data, that you can use to analyse student learning or engagement. If this is important, use internal social media.

Other issues

� Technical support available from LTAs� Bear in mind that LTAs give the highest levels of support to

internal social media, followed by ‘well known’ social media, while they may only be able to offer minimal support to more obscure social media.

� The social media site’s terms and conditions� It is worth familiarising yourself with them, as well the

University of Brighton’s policy and guidelines.

University policy

� The University’s Social Media policy and guidance

� https://staff.brighton.ac.uk/mac/policies/Social%20Media%20guidelines.pdf

� Links to the Switch it On policy and guidelines, and the Use of External Services guidelines:

� https://staff.brighton.ac.uk/clt/BL/Pages/Blended-Learning-policy-and-guidance.aspx