With over 80% of 15-35 year olds in Ireland signed up to the platform, one would find it hard to argue against the ubiquity of Facebook among our student population. Facebook has cannibalised the conversation prism over the past ten years and is now considered to a one stop shop for almost all online needs, from blogs to crowd wisdom and video to reviews and recommendation. For most students, the fear of missing out has them constantly checking their Facebook feed and liking, commenting and sharing have become communication norms. In classrooms, this can be viewed as a threat and a distraction which takes attention away from teachers and learning management systems alike.
At Waterford Institute of Technology’s Centre for Technology Enhanced Learning we investigated ways to embrace the benefits and minimise drawbacks of using Facebook as a resource and postulated its effectiveness as a Learning Management System. In this exercise we explored many potential issues such privacy, intellectual property, enrolment, content creation and distribution mechanics. Consideration was also given to Facebook’s content constraints as well as its suitability for web enhanced, blended and fully online learning in synchronous and asynchronous modes.
Learning Management Systems are used for the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting and delivery of educational courses or training programs. They help the instructor deliver material such as documents, presentations, images and videos to students and act as platforms for web enhanced, blended and fully online courses. The scope of this exercise was to determine the overlap between the requirements of a LMS and the features available in Facebook.
Early in our proof of concept implementation we identified need to create a walled garden in such an open and public space where the lecturer could control participants and monitor participation. We created a closed community with conversation mechanisms that were native to the masses. We have successfully simulated synchronous online delivery using Facebook Live and free open source video mixing software to stream the lecture and display presentations simultaneously. Facebook Live can facilitate live conversation between lecturer and students and can be easily configured to make the video available for asynchronous consumption.
Facebook’s native content types such as resources like image, link, document and video sharing, commenting and polls give much of the functionality of a standard LMS but one unintended benefit was the influence on the student’s Timeline. When students enrolled in the Facebook group and interacted with course material, Facebook’s algorithm took note of their new-found interest in the subject area and began serving related content to their Timeline. Appropriate course material is allowed into their “echo chamber” and adds to the learning experience.
Our findings show the changing landscape of digital and media consumption habits among undergraduate students influences their attention span, engagement and performance. To facilitate this, we drafted a framework for using Facebook as a Learning Management System, some techniques to overcome privacy and security concerns and a practical guide to using the tools and technologies that will help students engage on a platform that’s native to them.
Topics: Innovations and design in online & blended learning , Topics: Flexible learning
