Abstract:

Context:
The unintended pause due to COVID-19 forced educators to design new academic strategies for out-of-class time. Due to the exponential use of social media among students, it has been considered an appropriate tool to increase the academic engagement during out-of-class time. However, the huge amount of information available on Internet could increase misinformation among students, at the same time that make them feel frustrated. Therefore, any social media task should be designed to motivate students while avoiding misinformation by teaching them to identify quality information on Internet.

Purpose:
To evaluate the influence of social media to increase the out-of-class engagement, as well as to know the students’ satisfaction and perception about social media as academic tool to learn to identify quality information on Internet, to acquire academic competences and to compensate face-to-face seminars during the COVID-19 lockdown in undergraduate Physiotherapy students.

Methods:
Twenty-three undergraduate Physiotherapy students participated in this educational investigation that used Facebook as academic tool for the out-of-class time. To this end, a social media task was designed and incorporated to subject at the beginning of the semester. After finishing the subject and previous to the final exam, students were invited to fulfill an ad hoc anonymous online questionnaire to evaluate their satisfaction and perception about utility of the social media task throughout quantitative data. Qualitative comments were also considered to detect pitfalls and new opportunities. The number of resources that every student published on Facebook were registered to evaluate the engagement with the proposed activity.

Results:
Results regarding engagement showed that 26.1% of students completed more activities than required. Furthermore, students rated 7.8 ± 1.6 points (10.0 as maximal punctuation) their satisfaction with the social media task. High level of satisfaction was also shown in qualitative comments. Also, the usability of social media to learn to identify quality information on Internet, to acquire competences and to compensate face-to-face seminars reached high punctuation among students (>4.0; 5.0 as maximal punctuation).

Conclusion:
Social media was an appropriate tool to be used in academic context in order to maintain the students’ engagement, satisfaction and perception of useful task during the out-of-class time of COVID-19 pause.

Keywords:

Out-of-class, social media, undergraduate students, engagement.