A Social Media Platform in Higher Education

This paper reports on the successful use of Graasp, a social media platform, by university students for their collaborative work. Graasp features a number of innovations, such as administrator-free creation of collaborative spaces, context-aware recommendation and privacy management. In the context of a EU-funded project involving large test beds, we have been able to extend this platform with lightweight tools (widgets) aimed for learning and competence development and to validate its usefulness in a collaborative learning context

A critical discourse analysis of Nelson Mandela University’s Facebook page: a case of transformational communication

The South African Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) calls for all Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to develop, execute and establish strategies for achieving transformed racial truths - inside and outside the classroom. In HEIs, the social media platform, and most particularly, Facebook, is increasingly being used as a platform to critically and rigorously engage students and universities. The study presents Facebook as a social media platform that can contribute towards the transformation agenda. To illustrate this, the Nelson Mandela University was used as a single case study. Using a qualitative research approach, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) was used to analyse the Facebook posts that were shared by the university in 2015. This was done in consideration of the national Higher Education transformation themes, the university’s Vision 2020 strategic goals, as well as the university’s values. It was found that the institution partially uses the platform to address transformation. In addition to this, it was found that race representation for posts relating to excellence, student recruitment and protests reinforce race-based stereotypes. To address the gaps, the study recommends that the university includes posts that enhance engagement, race literacy, and race representation. The study contributes to the developing literature on the use of social media towards race transformation in South African HEIs

Strategic Use of Social Media by Higher Education to Influence Alumni Engagement

Social media is a low-cost platform to develop and maintain communications and relationships while overcoming the barrier of distance. Higher education is an expensive affair especially with financial needs growing day by day, opening up the need for alumni to involve in fundraising and institutional development. Higher education institution’s fundraising initiatives will need to adopt social media to establish and maintain ties with alumni. This literature review study investigates the strategic use of social media by higher education to influence alumni engagement. Articles from the Web of Science and Proquest are included in this review with a focus on how institutions employ social media to engage alumni and alumni engagement behaviors towards the alma mater. Our results suggest that age, program delivery method and academic program of study are significant factors to determine the donative behaviors of alumni

Conceptual Model of Knowledge Management and Social Media to Support Learning Process in Higher Education Institution

Nowadays social media has tremendously transformed organizational business process of institution. Higher Education as a place with the majority generation Y, that advances to use technology should realize these situations. With this social media platform, institution may facilitate the knowledge transfer process, then to support collaborative learning from e-learning to social learning. Referring to this phenomenon, this research will design the integration of concepts of knowledge management and social media as a framework to identify the significant components and its relationship to support each other. In this research, we use a systematic literature review from journal and text book to construct this collaboration model. The outcome of this study is collaboration model of knowledge management and social media to support learning process in higher education institution

Engaging Higher Education Students Through Tweeting

Social media such as Twitter helps engage learners and promotes interaction with course content. Twitter allows learners and educators to interact via “tweets” via Smartphones, laptops, or any device with Internet access. This presentation will demonstrate how to use Twitter as a platform for discussion, polling, question and answer sessions, and other collaborative interactions in a higher education classroom. It will step educators through the process of setting up a Twitter account and the process of planning a lesson with Twitter applications

Assessing the Effect of Digital Social Media towards Face to Face Communication during Pandemic COVID-19 in Higher Educational Institutions

This paper will assess the effect of social media on face-to-face (F2F) communication among students in a higher education institution. Previous scholars found that social media is a platform to connect people, especially in the current pandemic COVID-19. However, another study has shown the negative effect of social media among university students because it hampers students' real-life experiences. A literature survey has been selected to explore the effect of social media on F2F communication among students in a higher education institution. This paper also highlights the significant role of social media in higher education institutions during the pandemic of Covid19. Keywords: F2F communication, social media, Social Networking Sites (SNS), technology eISSN: 2398-4287 © 2022. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by E-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open-access article under the CC  BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer-review under the responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behavior Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioral Researchers on Asians), and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behavior Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia

Join Them, If You Cannot Beat Them – Social Media in Higher Education: A Qualitative Study on the Benefits of Using Social Media in Higher Education

The purpose of this qualitative research is evaluate the benefits of using social media in higher education. The research study focuses on the problem of millennial and generation Z students being extremely dependent on social media, taking time away from their holistic development. Social media, being a popular platform can be use in two-fold in higher education; (1) by faculty to increase the classroom engagement and interaction and (2) by administration and faculty collaboration to create a strong social impact. Social media is very loosely defined; however, it will yield positive results if it is used in the right way to interest students. With the help of social media, educator can: (1) convert the eyeballs into academic discussions and (2) drive more traffic or engagement to the content of the class. The study will be based on the FFF consumer model to understand the perceptions of students and faculty with the use of social media

Higher Education Marketing: A Study on the Impact of Social Media on Study Selection and University Choice.

The importance of the Internet as commercial platform is by now universally recognized, and businesses increasingly adopt online marketing channels at the cost of traditional ones. The social media, being second generation (Web 2.0) internet applications, allow interaction, one-to-one communication, customer engagement, and user generated content. The interest of higher education institutions in social media as part of the marketing toolkit is increasing, but little is known about the potential of these channels in higher education marketing strategies. Even less is known about the role of social media as influencers of future students in the choice of study and university. This article presents the results of a study identifying the role and importance of social media on the choice of future students for a study and university in comparison with the traditional university marketing channels in the Netherlands. The study identifies and describes three market segments among future students based on their use of the social medi

50,000 Facebook views from a $30 investment: CYP-Media’s use of open practices to increase access to learning in the children and young people’s sector<i></i>

In 2015 Tony Coughlan was awarded the Open Education Consortium award for Creative Innovation, recognising the impact of his CYP-Media project in using open educational practices (OEP) to increase access to learning in the children and young people’s sector. Core to CYP-Media is a blog (www.cyp-media.org) in which Tony curates and evaluates free e-learning, textbooks and journals for working with children of different ages and needs. The reach of these blog posts is maximised by dissemination through Facebook and Twitter. The CYP-Media.org blog cost only $30 to set up, yet its impact is substantial. The CYP-Media Facebook page has an average reach of 7,244 per item, with a maximum of about 500 shares or 50,000 views of an individual item, and Tony himself has been identified as one of the top 50 most influential social media-using professionals in UK higher education. CYP-Media shows how just one person can make a huge difference to achieving educational and social equity with a tiny financial investment and a commitment to openness. This paper outlines the conceptual background to CYP-Media, with its roots in Perryman and Coughlan’s (2013) ‘public open scholar’ research, Weller’s (2011) concept of the ‘digital scholar’, and the emerging practice and theories of digital curation. The paper details CYP-Media’s multi-platform social media strategy and the challenges encountered since the project’s inception in 2010, in addition to presenting a mixed methods analysis of CYP-Media’s reception within the children and young people’s sector. We conclude that openness does not have to be the province of institutions and organisations, or even smaller projects and that by listening to the needs of your target audience, rather than adopting a top-down approach, real educational transformation through OEP is within the reach of anyone.</i

Higher Education Institutions on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter: Comparing Swiss Universities’ Social Media Communication

Public communication has become more important to higher education institutions (HEIs), with many HEIs using social media to communicate with stakeholders. However, scholarship on the subject is scarce and mainly based on single-platform studies and small datasets. Therefore, we conducted a cross-platform study to examine the communication of all Swiss HEIs on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The results were based on two datasets: an automated analysis on data for all Swiss HEIs (n = 42) and their social media accounts from 2004 to 2021 (337,232 posts from 207 accounts), and a manual content analysis on 1,500 posts per platform. By including all HEIs in one country, this study allowed for a comparison of the results by HEI type: universities of applied sciences, universities of teacher education, and research universities. Results show that, in recent years, HEI communication increased on Instagram, but not on Facebook or Twitter. Twitter was used the most by research universities, while most Instagram and Facebook posts were from universities of applied sciences. Universities of teacher education were least active across all platforms. The content of communication across all HEI types was primarily self-referential. Our analysis of how well HEIs used the affordances of social media communication relative to hypertextuality and multimodality revealed a generally high level of adaption. Moreover, our data showed no substantial impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on posting activities and engagement with social media posts by HEIs for the two first years of the pandemic