Using Social Media to Maximize Students’ Learning Outcomes
With the emergence of various types of educational technologies the teachers’ role has become more of the facilitator instead of machine of delivering lectures. Today students have access to various sophisticated digital technologies and its use gets appreciation since businesses and other organizations expect graduates to be expert in new technologies.Since the use of social media has changed many things the manner people communicate and interact, this article highlights the scope and efforts to use social media to enhance learning experiences of undergraduates at Mirpur University of Science & Technology (MUST).Students’ responses to the new technologies have been incorporated to guide future course of actions. Since use of social media into a teaching assignment requires considerable time and effort by the teacher, nonetheless, experience of faculty in their efforts to use social media in the teaching of traditional courses has also been focused upon.
Management education using social media
The millennial generation of students are digital natives coming to higher education with extensive experience in social media. Business and other organizations are expecting their recruits to have high proficiency in these technologies, too. This article is an overview of the use of the main social media in teaching. Facebook, blogs, YouTube, Twitter, MySpace, and Second Life are discussed with examples of how they can be used to foster robust collaboration among learners in management education. The movement to richer media such as video blogs (vlogs) is assessed. Caveats for implementing the social media in higher educational settings are noted.
Virtual world teaching, experiential learning, and assessment: An interdisciplinary communication course in Second Life
While many reports espouse the potential impact that 3-D virtual worlds are expected to have on teaching and learning in higher education in a few years, there are few empirical studies that inform instructional design and learning assessment in virtual worlds. This study explores the nature and process of learning in Second Life in a graduate interdisciplinary communication course in fall 2007. Literature suggests that 3-D virtual worlds can be well suited for experiential learning environments. In this study, the actual instructional effectiveness of Second Life as an experiential learning environment for interdisciplinary communication is empirically examined using mixed research methods of journal content analysis, surveys, focus group, and virtual world snapshots and video.