Social Media’s Influence in the Classroom

Professors are becoming more comfortable using social media in the classroom. Although some may still view it as a time waster, others understand the tools available and are making the most of it in their teaching, according to the survey Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Facebook: How Today’s Higher Education Faculty Use Social Media from Babson Survey Research Group and Pearson.

The survey questioned nearly 4,000 teaching faculty from all disciplines in higher education. It’s no surprise younger professors are more apt to use social media, but is interesting that subject area is also a determining factor. Humanities and arts professors reported the highest use rates and those in natural sciences the lowest.

There are, of course, concerns about the integrity of student submissions, in addition to issues of integration with learning management systems, but those are much less worrisome today when compared to a similar survey from 2011.

Video continues to be rated highly by professors. Nearly 34% create their own videos for classroom use and about 40% use video created by their institution. Those numbers jump to 70% and 80%, respectively, when referring to videos provided by education companies and those found online.

Future of the textbooks: Publisher view

The Chronicle has a 9 minute podcast interview of William D. Rieders, executive vice president for new media at the publishing company Cengage Learning. It is a worthwhile podcast to listen to as it lays out some of where publishers see the future of etextbooks -- and it is not the PDF of the traditional textbook. As with many publishers, the company is focusing on interactive software programs -- like assessment tools and study tools.

One of the best quotes, also quoted in the summary:

Print textbooks are still healthy, but they function now as a reference for professors and students, while these other materials are taking center stage in the learning experience.

That the core function for textbooks is recognized as changing should be of concern to anyone whose core business is selling that product. It signals that the time is right to be moving toward models and capabilities that enable selling the "replacement product." Cengage has been very innovative in the past couple years, as have some of the other educational publishers, in experimenting and testing out different approaches to what the future of digital course materials might really look like.

Podcasts vs. Classroom Lectures

This month’s edition of eSchool News has an interesting article about a study entitled “iTunes University and the Classroom: Can Podcasts Replace Professors?” The study was conducted at the State University of New York Fredonia and compared the performance of college students who attended a lecture in person to those who viewed the lecture via a podcast from iTunes. The students participating in the study were competing for an iTunes gift card so the actual scores were not as high as they might have been if they were graded however, the study found that students who watched the podcast scored an average of 71% while those who attended the classroom lecture scored an average of 62%. The largest factor affecting these scores was note taking and students that took notes while watching the podcasts scored an average of 15 points higher than the students in the classroom lecture. Researchers for the study explained that note taking is a key factor in both learning environments and students that do not pay attention during podcasts will be just as unprepared as if they did not focus in the classroom. However, podcasts do give students an advantage because they can pause and rewind the lecture to capture more notes than they could in a classroom. The study also found that combining the two learning methods may be the most beneficial option with more than 90 percent of students saying that they would prefer “traditional lectures with computer-based learning as a supplement for revising” their notes.