Abstract:

With a purpose to explore how social networking services can affect roles and communication among students and between students and teachers we incorporated a teacher-administrated Facebook-group in a university course. The Facebook-group was used as a complementary communication channel to email and the already existing learning management system Bilda, and chosen as earlier research has shown that it to a large extent is used among/within student groups [1]. Based on this we argue that it is relevant to study how to use these resources in a more formal way to support communication and learning - a need that has been identified in past educational research [2].

The work was guided by the following research question:
* What communication patterns can be identified and what do these mean for the role of the teacher and the student, respectively?

A mixed method approach was used for the data collection. Quantitative results from a survey and statistics based on number of posts, comments and reactions have been combined with qualitative results focusing on post categories and type users.

The study was conducted on a master's course in human-computer interaction in the fall of 2017, which included a total of 63 students and 3 teachers. 48 of these students chose to join the Facebook-group. The course was held in English. The gender distribution among students who joined the Facebook-group was 76% male and 24% female and all teachers were male. 90% of these students were between 20 and 28 years. The vast majority of the study population used Facebook frequently before the study started. The majority of the students were also positive towards using Facebook on the specific course and in learning contexts generally.

Several trends have emerged among the findings, for example the majority of the posts concerned logistics, course activities and student collaborations, and particularly the latter two categories involved a high student activity. The main activity among students were commenting and responding, showing a high engagement in posted material. On several occasions, students also commented on questions that were actually directed to teachers and in this regard, students can be said to take on activities one might expect the teacher to do. This is in line with the result from [3].

References:
[1] D.L. Thomsen, M.T. Sørensen, and T. Ryberg, “Where have all the students gone? They are all on Facebook now,” in Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Networked Learning, pp.93–102, 2016.
[2] P.A. Tess, “The role of social media in higher education classes (real and virtual) – A literature review,” Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 29, no. 5, pp. A60–A68, 2013.
[3] P. Josefsson, Higher education meets private use of social media technologies: An explorative study of students’ use, doctoral thesis, Stockholm: Royal Institute of Technology, 2017.

Keywords:

Communication patterns, Higher education, Facebook.