Social Media in the Classroom

Have you ever taken an online class? As an FIU student who worked full time, I became accustomed to the convenience of online classes. At FIU, we used Blackboard as our online education LMS (learning management system). Miami Dade uses Angel, and Keiser University uses CampusVue as their portal. Many people in the education industry assume that in order to run online courses, it must be done through an LMS. Those systems were originally designed to allow faculty to transition their on campus courses to fully online without having to learn HTML coding. Anyone who has messed with HTML knows it's no walk in the park, and certainly not something a busy college professor wants to learn just to facilitate a group of students. These systems, like Blackboard, provided all the tools necessary to deliver an online course in one simple, and easy to use (somewhat) package.

Take it from someone who took almost two full years of classes though Blackboard; it's not that simple. These systems are flawed, glitchy, and not without confusing elements. They may be convenient, but they're not flawless. As online learning has grown, so did the functionality of course management systems. As the systems grew, they became more and more complex and fragile. The systems that were once managed by faculty is now monitored and kept up and running by IT guys, and webmasters.

Now, professors around the country have taken control back from system administrators by implementing social media sites (such as this one)into their curriculum. Blogs, Wikis, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, and VoiceThread are being used in ways never imagined. From using Twitter as a real time discussion forum, to writing assignments being turned in via Blogger, professors are learning to maximize these free resources we thought were only around to post pictures from that Pi Kappa Phi party, and tell everyone that, "I'm going to the beach on Friday with the chicas!"

The beauty of using these sites as an online learning tool is that they are free, and easy to use. Instead of spending hours upon hours stocking modules into an LMS, a faculty member can simply write a blog in minutes, start a Twitter discussion in seconds, and spend all of his/her time communicating with the students. It creates a great platform for learning because it is interactive and personal. The professor can help individuals out more easily than through Blackboard emails and forums, which often go down for hours at a time due to glitches.

These methods of e-learning have started to catch on with select colleges and universities, but most do not have a social media strategy in place at the moment. They still believe online classes must be run through an LMS. Some systems, like Blackboard, are adding social media modules like blogs, but they are locked down in the LMS, thus restricting the openness and exponential power that gives these forms of media its value.

It's about time we started seeing social media as more than just a hang out spot to talk to our friends, and realize that it is a networking tool that can make or break our professional lives. An obscene amount of companies are looking into a person's social media portfolio before committing to hiring a person. Why would they do that? Well, we are living in a time of great economic discord, and jobs are difficult to come by. Companies don't want to waste their time and money on anything less than the best. They have so many options on who to hire because so many qualified people are unemployed. Who do you think will get the job between two identical resumes? The person with the professional Linked In account, and a Facebook that shows them to be responsible, mature adults worthy of ________ company, or the person who has a Facebook full of drunken escapades and shady friends?

Social Media will be a big part of the classroom within the next five years. I don't think it's a bold prediction to say that...

-Danny
www.cbt.edu
www.cbt.edu/facebook