Abstract:

Asynchronous online discussions are a very important part of every e-learning system no matter who moderates the discussion – professor or student. However, ten year long research conducted at Zagreb school of economics and management (ZSEM) has shown that students' activity in discussions on Learning Management System (LMS) as well as the quality of the discussions have dramatically decreased in that period. The situation is similar with the quizzes that are conducted through the asynchronous professor-student discussions, which are used to motivate students to become more active and learn through the game. This was a trigger to change channels for these discussions on the ICT courses and bring it to social networks. In this paper we wanted to analyze how the introduction of a new channel close to students in the educational process can motivate students to further engage in the course. Firstly, the survey was distributed among 200 students of ZSEM, from first year of study to fifth (graduate students) in which students' habits regarding use of social networks were examined. The survey results showed that as many as 50% of students spend two to three hours a day on social media networks. Since as many as 88% of students often use Instagram, and 81% of them would occasionally like to see some teaching content on social networks, Instagram was chosen as an additional channel where the asynchronous discussion quiz is shared: in parallel on LMS Moodle and Instagram story. Quizzes were presented during two courses: one in the junior year and other during the senior year, for two generations. Only 13% of students responded to the quizzes on LMS answering 10% of the questions on average, while 39% participated over Instagram answering 31% of the questions on average. Junior year students participated more (56% Instagram, 16% LMS) than senior year ones (25% Instagram, 10% LMS). Furthermore, female students are more active (50% Instagram, 15% LMS) than their male colleagues (29% Instagram, 11% LMS). This paper shows how education has to adapt to a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment (VUCA) in which we live and has to try to adapt the existing materials and methods to new generations of students and different groups among them.

Keywords:

Teaching tool, e-learning, social networks, asynchronous online discussion.