Social Media and Student Engagement

Social media has become an important part of our private and professional lives and as such, it presents new challenges and powerful learning opportunities for students and educators at all levels. Although the world of social media has been, to a large extent, dominated by the two social media giants— Facebook and Twitter - new entries into the social platform space are expanding rapidly. Learning how to interact on various social media platforms is crucial to survive and thrive in this age of digital communication. In this course, students will explore key issues in social media technologies and their application to the educational environment. Topics may include the value of social media for distributed education, current and future trends in social software, delivering content using specific applications (blogs, wikis, podcasts, webcasts, etc.), the impact of social media tools to transform teaching and learning, and issues of course design to support learner engagement and online social media use in distributed and mobile environments. Students will conduct literature-based research to explore these topics, and propose future implementations of social media that have the purpose of promoting and sustaining student engagement.