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How Professors Are Using Twitter to Engage Students Outside of the Classroom


Colleges and universities have been adopting social media as a means of recruiting prospective students, increasing their recognition and keeping in touch with their undergraduates, graduates, alumni, faculty and staff. It has turned into a means of survival for most, but has helped schools provide an inside view into their community by highlighting their student’s interests and activities.

Twitter is teeming with handles from Boston’s best and brightest higher ed institutes. They’ve acknowledged how crucial staying synced in is, and while they’ve worked to reach their students outside of the classroom, it’s really the professor’s who’ve been paving the way. Numerous teachers, including two in particular from Boston College, have adopted the use of personal hashtags to reach out to their students and make learning more fun and interactive.

“There’s a huge upside to teaching students on Twitter,” said John Gallaugher, a professor of Information Systems at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College.

Gallaugher mandates his students tweet at least once a week. He, himself, tweets from @gallaugher, which helps him create a relationship with his students outside of the classroom. Their class hashtag is #cs021, and through that, students have been able to contribute news, ask questions and share their own work.

Fellow Information Systems professor, Gerald Kane (@profkane), requires his students blog. Thanks to Twitter, students now have a platform to promote their posts after they’ve been published. Kane’s Intro to Computer Systems class tweets using #mi021, but it’s his social media class, #mi621, that receives the most traffic.

Prior to the dawn of Twitter, students would tear out articles they found interesting and bring them to their professor’s after class. Now, students can link to those articles on Twitter and with one simple hash tag, share them with the entire class.

“Twitter is about learning,” Gallaugher said, who reminds his students there’s a lot you can discover from those you follow.

Many of the guest speakers who visit Gallaugher and Kane’s classes have a large presence on Twitter. Because of that presence, students can not only get more background information on the speakers, but they can also communicate with the speakers after their lecture is over, allowing for a stronger, more long-term interaction. Former students, as well as parents, have been jumping in on the Twitter streams themselves, bringing more opinions to the table and enhancing classroom discussion.

“Social media blasts out the conventional dialogue between students and faculty, students and alumni, and students and parents,” Gallaugher said.

There’s only so much that can be discussed in a two-hour class. By utilizing Twitter, students can carry their conversations over from the classroom while they’re still fresh in their heads.

“Twitter creates an online conversation that goes beyond the face-to-face meeting,” Kane said. “The value of using Twitter is the extended class conversation when you can’t meet in person.”

What Kane likes is that he can “double dip” with Twitter, using it in the classroom to teach his students and then outside of the classroom to teach his students. By having a personal hashtag, Kane’s also been able to save him and his students time. Quite often, Kane said his students reach out to him via Twitter with homework questions. By tweeting a response with the class hashtag, everyone can see it. So, instead of getting 10 different emails from 10 different students all asking the same question, he can have one student ask the question and then respond to the entire class. Along the same lines, students can also use Twitter to share collective notes.

Gallaugher encourages all students to sign up to Twitter, not only for the classroom component, but for everything else they can get out of it. He told a story of a venture capitalist who tweeted saying he was looking for an intern. When Gallaugher asked if he wanted him to post the opportunity on the school’s career board, he said no. He wanted to hire the kind of person who was already following the company on Twitter and knew what they were up to.

“Social media is really the new résumé,” Gallaugher said.

For most, Twitter’s become the new go-to resource for the latest news, tips and trends. Although students might use the platform to discuss what they’ve eaten for lunch at the dining hall, the tool has slowly been taken beyond that and factored into academia. The use of hashtags is something that all professors will, hopefully, begin to implement. By doing so, they can create a conversation outside of the classroom not only with their students, but with the world.

To learn more about what Gallaugher and Kane are teaching, as well as what their students are saying, start following their hashtags. Kane said, “We want everyone to start chiming in.”

via ifttt