Social media and the student experience — a reflection on open communication in Higher Education.
During the Open Knowledge in Higher Education (OKHE) course unit, the aspect of my current practice that I have reflected upon the most is my School’s use of social media, and in particular our use of Facebook groups, to share knowledge between students and staff. These Facebook groups began life around four years ago as a pre-arrival activity to enable prospective students to make contact with their peers before they got to Manchester, hopefully making the prospect of university life a little less daunting. A member of our admissions team creates the group and then invites applicants to join when they have accepted an unconditional place on the course. Initially we expected that the group would trail off after Welcome Week, but instead it remained very active throughout the first year and on into successive years of study. As a result we currently have an active Facebook group for each year of study.
The vast majority of posts and comments on the groups are made by students, which reflects the fact that student members vastly outnumber staff members. The current first year Facebook group has 206 student members (this accounts for around 95% of the total cohort) and 9 staff members, who are a mixture of academic and support staff. Although these closed groups have a restricted membership, and are therefore not open access, they do facilitate open communication and open knowledge. Students, for example, most frequently use the groups to help one another by sharing academic resources, such as posting links to course materials or uploading copies of lecture notes. Students will often post questions asking each other for help with a particular topic or course unit. Sometimes their questions are more practical in nature, such as ‘when do we get the exam timetable?’ or ‘does anyone know what happens if I fail a unit?’ Staff involvement in the groups grew when it became apparent that fellow students were not always able to provide accurate answers to these questions. Members of staff also began to contribute to the groups by signposting University services and events, and other information that may be of interest to students in that particular cohort.
Staff involvement in the groups recently became more contentious when a student made a critical and rather sarcastic comment in response to a work experience opportunity that had been posted by a member of the University Careers Service. This student felt that the opportunity in question was not subject specific enough — it related to the advertising branch of a large technology company — and did not warrant being posted to a Facebook group dedicated to engineering students. The staff member responded explaining why they felt it was relevant, and another student supported them by pointing out that many engineering students choose to work in other sectors after they graduate.
Some members of staff however were still unhappy about the negative tone of the original comment and felt that the students should be counselled in a more formal way about their conduct. Although I shared their disappointment at the way in which the student had expressed themselves, I felt uncomfortable about the suggestion of further action. Their post had been critical and dismissive, but it could not be described as abusive or offensive and would in no way contradict Facebook’s community standards. Did we have any grounds to take the matter offline, and even if we did, should we? Several of my colleagues felt certain that we should; even though it is hosted on Facebook, they argued, it is still a University group and students should behave in a way that we would expect them to in other University settings.
My main concern with this logic is that I believe these Facebook groups are successful exactly because they aren’t perceived as being ‘official’. It’s certainly true that the Facebook platform is much more conducive to creating discussion groups than the University’s VLE platform, Blackboard, whose forums have always failed to sustain any significant discussion. But the other major benefit of Facebook over Blackboard, as I see it, is that it very much feels like neutral ground. I suspect that for its members it blends into their other social networking groups and they correspondingly behave in an open and authentic way. Even before this issue arose, I noted that students are much more likely to express honest opinions about their University experience, both positive and negative, through Facebook than they are via any official channel, even though there are clearly members of staff present in each group.
From my perspective, critical posts can be as valuable, if not more so, than the positive content that is being shared. There have been several times when a post on Facebook has given us early warning of a problem before it has been formally reported, enabling staff to rectify it more quickly. It can also provide much needed context as it did recently when one student reported a concern with an exam. Having received just one complaint we may have assumed it was an isolated issue, but widespread agreement on Facebook indicated otherwise. I think there is a real risk that if these groups become more obviously regulated and students start to feel inhibited in their ability to comment, then the openness of the discussion and the value associated with that openness will be compromised for both staff and students.
What the OKHE course has enabled me to understand is that openness inevitably brings with it challenges, and by being open you will facilitate views that you dislike or challenge your own views. In order to preserve an open environment I think that as staff members have to stop thinking of ourselves as the owners of these online communities and try to engage with them as participants instead. How we do this consistently and responsibly presents us with another challenge, because being active participants of a community means that sometimes it will be appropriate for us to both intervene as well as contribute. The difficulty is in determining what the parameters of our role should be. Currently the University of Manchester does not have any policy on the use of social media sites in teaching and learning activities. As the use of social media in the Higher Education sector seems likely to rise, and over an increasing range of different platforms, I feel that there is a growing need for guidance to help staff negotiate their role within these sites.
