Social media in higher education

In this blog I am going to talk about the role of Social media in higher education, and show how faculty members reacting towards it. while reading a couple of articles and some statistics about this topic, I have realized that the time we are facing now, with the pandemic of the Corona virus, the rising of online learning, and the technology pedagogy, have confirmed all speculations and assumption about our future and how to deal with social media.

Many scholars, researchers, and even educators have the influence to use many platforms in the digital and social media, either to express or to share information by communicating with colleagues, and students. From a positive aspect, some uses blogs, and learning platforms as a part-time activity away from their academic life or as a complementary, especially if they have adequate no. of audience and followers to be influenced.

I have found an article in the chronicle of higher education, about a twitter account known by “shit academics say” with 122,000 followers that were established in 2013, in addition to a Facebook page with 105 million followers, this account gets followed a lot weekly and it is a good example to talk about. It started as a distraction for academics reading humorous details of academic content dealing with a different combination of emotions such as and I am quoting “boredom/anger while grading, guilt/envy while reviewing a transcript or relief/happy after a grant deadline get shifted”.

This blog had have benefited him with an access to connect with academics all over the world, he also used Twitter to recruit over 6800 faculties and graduate students from over 60 countries to participate in 3 online studies on topics such as imposter syndrome and work-life balance; resulting in one of the most comprehensive and international investigations of psychological well-being in academia to date. Therefore, it gave a great model on how you can use social media to act on a position or a challenge resonate with academia.

This example shows how effective social media can be to academia, but there are many failed experiment that led to bad influence to students and to faculty, due to the lack of experience, and not is aware on how the material posted effect on others.

An interesting info-graphic to support this example I have mentioned above, is the one that shows the most popular platform used by academics, as you can see Facebook and Twitter are the most certainly used as a valuable tool for external relations, marketing, and advancements such as recruiting students, engaging alumni, sustaining an image, crisis management, increase awareness and advocacy, and certainly engaging admitted students, faculty and current students with campus life. As you can see also different audiences are targeted according to the goal you are searching for, such as LinkedIn and Twitter, compared to blogs and other platforms.

Those studies are from 2012, so I have looked for newer results, and I have found some statistics of universities that are using social media to achieve same goals, what was interesting to find that Virginia tech university is one of the top universities using social media, and I confirm as I am following the University in all social media.

I totally support the use of social media for achieving many goals, However, it should be monitored and designed. And I also support that academic faculty should use such platforms to connect with students and the world to learn and navigate new approaches.

Source: https://www.chronicle.com/article/AcademicsSay-The-Story/231195