FACEBOOK AND ENGINEERING STUDENTS: USING THIS TOOL FOR THE PROMOTION OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT

The entrepreneurship is a specific skill contributing for newly-created companies and it promotes job creation among young people. The entrepreneurship is considered in the European Higher Education area as a viable option to favor the self-employment between the young persons. Besides it is a necessary requirement in a knowledge-based economy especially in the actual employment context with high unemployment rates. It is, therefore, an educational objective of great importance in the Engineering Degrees the development of the transversal skill “ability of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial culture”.

Developing this skill with classic methodologies turns out complex, so it is necessary to introduce new methodologies that favor its implementation.

The great educational change produced by the Higher European Education Area makes possible to introduce new technologies which focusses the teaching-learning process on the students. In this way it is encouraged the students´ leading role. Therefore the use of social networks can play an important role in order to promote the motivation and the collaboration, as well as the information exchange. These tools promote the interaction and cooperation between persons and break the time-space barriers [1].

The aim of this work is to use the social network Facebook as tool to promote the transverse skill "entrepreneurial ability and the enterprising culture" between students of different engineering branches of the Engineering Degree. This will lead to a higher employability as a result of acquiring this skill. In this sense the students will become in facts their business ideas.

The Facebook participation was monitored by Grytics Analytics software, an innovative tool for analyzing the participation of the students in social media networks. This software has achieved the key performance indicators (KPI) which can monitor actions. Information about total activity was compiled diary, weekly and monthly. The total activity was measured as number of “likes”, posts, comments and number of visits. All these data were pooled as activity score and the most influential, dedicated and interactive student were identify.

The results were satisfactory; the students considered the experience as novelty, attractive and useful. It allowed them to learn the most relevant aspects of the entrepreneurship in an effective and flexible way.

References:
[1] M. Iglesias García, C. González Días, “Facebook como herramienta educativa en el contexto universitario”, Historia y Comunicación Social, vol. 19, pp.379-391, 2014.