A History Lesson

Earlier in the month, Jared Horvath posted a short article by Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch entitled “The EdTech Revolution Has Failed.”

In  this post, they noted that the early 2010s saw a digital revolution in Western schools with the widespread adoption of 1-to-1 devices like laptops, tablets, and iPads. However, they felt that this optimism had waned as OECD reviews indicated that educational technology had not delivered its promised academic benefits, coinciding with declining global test scores in math, science, and reading since the early 2010s – a trend that worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Their post featured insights from neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath, who argued that the EdTech revolution had failed, noting that many European and Southeast Asian schools were returning to traditional teaching methods.  They expressed interest in hearing counter-arguments supporting the benefits of digital technology in classrooms.

While not totally on point with their article, it brought to mind a book chapter that I co-authored with two of my graduate students, that unfortunately did not see the light of day after the editors dropped the book project.  So I thought I would post that chapter here.  It described my online graduate class from about five years ago…and a lot has changed in five years!  But as a history lesson, it might be of interest.  It described a doctoral online course I taught in which blogging was used rather than discussion boards, supplemented with (at that time) Twitter.  To me, it demonstrated that perhaps the EdTech Revolution did not fail…since as always, the focus should not have been EdTech but rather learning!

Adding Social Media for an Engaged Online Course

Britt Watwood¹, Kirk Barbieri², and Ashley Fedan³

¹ Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, Creighton University

² Chief Operating Officer, Scitent

³ Independent CRNA contractor in Seattle WA

The use of asynchronous online courses had become mainstream in higher education throughout the world even before the 2020 pandemic (Seaman et al., 2018). In 2018, one in three higher education students took at least one online class, with one in seven exclusively taking online classes. In the past decade, many of these classes seem to follow a similar blueprint of reading assignments – potentially augmented with video – followed by discussions, written assignments, and/or assessment tests. While the technologies associated with online education have significantly evolved in the past decade, and quickly expanded due to the global pandemic of 2020, the engagement with and between students within some of these courses continues to vary widely (Gray & DiLoreto, 2016; Miller, 2014; Rice & Kipp, 2020). Student engagement has been defined as “students’ willingness, need, desire, and compulsion to participate in, and be successful in, the learning process” (Bomia et al., 1997, p. 294). One potential explanation for this variability in engagement lies in whether online students feel connected to their classmates and instructor (Gray & DiLoreto, 2016). Social media could provide a means to add this connection.

The lead author of this chapter has taught online using a variety of learning management systems (LMS) for two decades. An early lesson he learned was that moving courses online involved more than simply providing and sequencing content. While quality course content obviously remains a significant factor, the evolution of the web towards a more interconnected and social space suggests that one could move outside the learning management system (LMS) and use social media to drive increased engagement (Watwood et al., 2009). Key factors for effective online classes include active learning, engagement, and social presence of both faculty and students (Garrison, 2017; Griesmemer, 2012; Miller, 2014; O’Malley, 2017). Social presence is easier in a course located on campus, and that presence can be difficult to emulate in online courses. However, social media provides a potential tool for increasing engagement and social presence.

This chapter will feature background on the use of social media in online courses and some details about the design of an online graduate course using blogs and Twitter. Key to this chapter will be three stories from the perspectives of the course instructor and two of his students who participated in this course. Following the stories is a scholarly commentary centered around networked learning and a set of discussion questions for further dialogue.

The Evolution of the Social Media Ecosystem

Social media began in the late 1990s with the advent of user profiles, friend’s lists, and online chat features, and today has morphed into what McFadden (2018) described as a virtual ecosystem. In many ways, the quick adoption of this virtual ecosystem is unprecedented. Kelly (2018) noted that this quick evolution brought with it other attributes: camera phones, human genome sequencing, reliable GPS, and home WiFi. As of early 2020, there were an estimated 3.6 billion social media users online (Clement, 2020). Two-thirds of those users have Facebook accounts and over one billion users have watched videos on YouTube or shared photos via Instagram (Conley & Sabo, 2015; Ortiz-Ospina, 2019). The rise of social media is one of the most significant technological events of our time and it continues to impact how we work, play, collaborate, and communicate (Friedman, 2016; Kelly, 2016; Singer & Brooking, 2018). With social media, our social behaviors have dramatically changed in just the past decade, from how we find partners to how we access the news and how we collectively organize for protests (Ortiz-Ospina, 2019). With the pivot online due to the global pandemic, social media has been suggested as a means to replicate the social connections available previously in on-campus classes (Al-Bahrani & Moryl, 2020).

My Course Design

The eight-week online interdisciplinary graduate course described in this chapter explored the intersection of leadership and digital technology. This course took place pre-pandemic, but the model could work well as we move into post-pandemic instruction. Course topics included the evolution of web tools, key leadership issues in a digital world, and the collaborative nature of networked learning. In crafting the course, I purposely chose to have course dialogue take place on the messy open web, rather than within the safe confines of a LMS. Given the focus on opportunities and challenges associated with leadership in a digitally connected world, I thought that the addition of digital means of communication outside the traditional LMS made sense. For this course, we used blogs and Twitter for communication. Blogs have existed for two decades, and blogging provides a platform for online journaling and discourse (Downes, 2004; Hammond, 2016). The instructor and each student created their own personal blogs, with posts displayed on the open web. Each week, students were given topical prompts for both tweets and blog posts.

Twitter, a 2006 microblogging application with a 280-character limitation, had over 300 million users as of 2019 (Joosten, 2012; Ortiz-Ospina, 2019). Users can post brief messages, known as “tweets”, and can instantly follow the communications of other people by audience, topic or a variety of other categories. Twitter has become an open forum of ideas and opinions exchanged among users and their followers (Smith, 2020). As with blogs, anyone with access to the web can view and respond to these tweets (Joosten, 2012). Years ago, Barbara Ganley (2007) tweeted “tweet to connect – blog to reflect” …and as shown in Figure 1, that concept of mixing short tweets with long reflective posts for discussions was made a weekly part of this leadership course.

Weekly Class Flow

Note. The model was created by the authors to demonstrate how prompts located within the LMS led to student dialogue on the open web using Twitter and blogs. Tweets were used to share links and thoughts, while deeper reflections were shared via blog posts.

The traditional LMS was used to provide the weekly instructions for the class (syllabus, readings, weekly Twitter and blog prompts, and grades), but all significant engagement between students and instructors, as well as between students, took place on the open web. Students crafted their post in their own blog, and all student blog posts were then automatically collected and fed through a website called Inoreader back in to the LMS, so that students did not have to hunt for each other’s blog posts. In a similar fashion, a hashtag allowed for all class tweets to be aggregated to one location, with most students using Tweetdeck to access these tweets. During the 2016 and 2020 Presidential elections in the United States, social media was used for both connections and for misinformation and manipulation (Suciu, 2020). As a metacognitive process, this class allowed leadership students to experience the fluid connectivity of social media and sometimes the vagueness of communications. The following section provides some narrative about this graduate level leadership course from the perspective of the course instructor, as well as two students from the course.

The Instructor Experience

This course was an opportunity for me, Britt Watwood, to apply years of online teaching experience in a new way. I had previously designed graduate courses which maximized the use of discussion as the primary learning process, yet began to find discussion forums within an LMS a stifling environment for students. As this course explored the topic of leadership within a digital workforce, it made sense to me to use a digital environment for our engagement. I had been blogging for many years and had used blogs in a previous on-campus class, so I felt prepared to use these tools in this online class.

Understanding that few of my students would have expertise in blogging, it was important to scaffold their use in the first few weeks of this eight-week course. In the syllabus, I recommended two popular blogging platforms – WordPress and Blogger – and provided links with tutorials to facilitate their set-up. I wanted the students to own their blog, not be assigned one by me. Traditional online courses often lock student intellectual property away in the LMS. Using blogs, any intellectual property developed by the students would still be available after the course was over rather than locked away within the LMS. I actively commented on all student blog posts during the opening weeks to both model practice and encourage their reflections.

One important factor that I was cognizant of was that I was requiring my graduate students to establish a web presence, which might run afoul of their individual privacy concerns. Conley and Sabo (2015) noted that social media is a pervasive force in the lives of modern learners, yet one should not assume that all students were facile and in favor of its use in a course. My requirement for the class was that they had to blog and tweet, but that they did not have to disclose their identity in doing so. In other words, I was comfortable with any of them establishing an avatar to use in the class, with only the student and myself aware of their identity. For some in existing management positions, this alleviated a concern that they might post viewpoints that could be used against them in the future.

From a pedagogical viewpoint, this class had multiple layers of metacognition. Seth Godin in a 2009 video interview noted that with blogging “…what matters is the metacognition of thinking about what you are going to say” (Godin & Peters, 2009, 0:12). Students reflected on the weekly topics, and then used the commenting features of both Twitter and blogs to dive deeper into their reflections. For instance, in one week I provided students with a history of the evolution of knowledge management (KM), and then asked the students to post on the relevance of KM to their situation. Given the interdisciplinary make-up of the class, posts ranged from KM being highly relevant to outdated, which then prompted deeper give and take in follow-on comments. In other words, students moved from thinking about the topic of KM to thinking about their thinking on KM—a key objective in metacognition. From my perspective, the use of tweeting and blogging allowed for richer dialogue than I had achieved in the past in discussion forums. The students tended to write more and write at a deeper level in the blogs than they did in discussion forums in an LMS. Further, the ability to add images seemed to spark creativity, with posts becoming less “an assignment” and more a sharing of viewpoints. Likewise, the engagement between students through blog posts was much greater than I had previously seen on traditional discussion forums. While required to comment to a minimum number of blogs, I found that many students exceeded the requirement and engaged with more classmates on a weekly basis. I encouraged this behavior by having two separate grades weekly. The first was for the quality of their blog post, while the second was for the quality of the comments they made to their classmates’ blogs.

Students had the freedom to customize their blog platforms to their personality, and the platforms facilitated the mixing of media with text. For instance, for one week’s prompt on personal leadership styles, one student illustrated his leadership style by using the song “Hold on loosely” from the band 38 Special – complete with a link to the YouTube video! The lyrics provided a neat metaphor for how he interacted with subordinates:

Just hold on loosely – But don’t let go
If you cling [too] tightly – You’re gonna lose control (Barnes, 1981).

His use of music lyrics inspired others in his class to think about other song metaphors that might apply to their leadership, adding to the enjoyment of the class. It was not unusual for post-class evaluations to use the word “fun” in describing the experience, and I saw that as a good thing!

The fact that the outside world could see and connect with the students led to some interesting learning opportunities that could not have otherwise occurred on the password-protected and limiting LMS. On one occasion, a student wrote a rather negative reaction to the week’s assigned reading in his weekly blog post, hyperlinking to the article and detailing why he thought the author was wrong. The first person that responded to his blog post was the lead author of that assigned article! Over the next three days, his blog post received 54 comments, with three-quarters coming from individuals outside the class, some of whom were noted experts in the field. The realization that people outside the class might be reading their posts led to dramatic improvements in the quality of posts by all students, not just this student. It was an amazing learning experience and an opportunity to bridge the space between practitioner and scholar. It did not happen with every class or every post, but comments from people outside the class tended to enrich the learning experience.

Complementing the rich blog posts were the weekly tweets by students. In many cases, tweets provided an opportunity for students to share links to relevant material from their own discipline that supplemented the reading provided by the instructor. Students often provided follow-up tweets to these links, resulting is side conversations that drove the learning deeper – all within 280 characters. The ease with which one could tweet (as opposed to crafting discussion forum or blog posts) reinforced this engagement, and in turn increased the affective relationships they made with others in the class. Unlike LMS discussion forums where they might post on one day and then return days later to respond, students (and I as the instructor) could receive notifications via their smartphones as soon as anyone responded to their tweets, and that motivated them to respond in kind immediately, leading to a sense of presence and informality in their class that they had not felt in other online classes. Students noted in the end of course evaluations that they felt closer to their classmates because of tweeting.

For me as instructor, there was a time commitment involved in commenting to student tweets and blogs, but I would suggest that it was no more than if I was providing feedback to their papers. It was simply distributed across several days rather than in one sitting as I had done in previous courses. What I liked about the process was the openness of this feedback process, particularly in Twitter. The shift from expert to co-learner became evident as I and students tweeted together. I frequently noted how my own personal learning was expanding through these interactions. Making my thinking visible helped drive some of the class discussions and moved all of us forward.

I used my own blog to share lessons learned from the process, as in the post “Human focus in a tech world” (Watwood, 2019). I also continue to use the same hashtag on Twitter class after class, finding that students who had taken the course previously sometimes respond to new students as they see tweets – adding to sense of community around the learning.

For me, this sense of community enabled through blogging and tweeting enhanced the learning process within this class. I have worked with other universities that used blogging as a connecting medium across an entire program, such that students begin blogging as they start their program, and then use it as a reflective vehicle later in their program. As instructors taught their own individual courses, they joined a community-wide forum through blog posts and Twitter, allowing for engagement across courses to connect ideas and concepts to a bigger whole. Obviously, this investment would need to be adopted by all the faculty within a program, but I could see true benefits arising from such an adoption.

Of course, I am biased, so I invited two of my previous students who had not blogged in the past to provide their perspectives on the course.

The Learner Experiences

 Career IT Professional’s First Experience Using Social Media

Elective courses in my doctoral interdisciplinary leadership program were limited to only five choices. Although students could choose from a variety of leadership topics, I, Kirk Barbieri, felt a sense of trepidation as I selected each course hoping that I was making the “right” decision. I selected this technology and leadership course for two reasons: first, I am an IT professional having spent my entire career in information technology management in higher education and, second, I had prior experience with the course instructor so I knew this course would be challenging, engaging, and thought provoking. However, what I did not anticipate was that the format of the course would be significantly different from my prior courses. Rather than using the university’s traditional learning management system, this course used a variety of social media tools to prompt learner interaction with classmates and the instructor, to immerse the learner in emerging trends in technology transformation, and to challenge the learner to think differently about how to lead people, and perhaps even machines or robots, in this ever-changing world of technological innovation. Kelly (2016) suggests that we are “endless newbies” in our quest to stay current amidst the accelerating pace of technological change. While there are many uncertainties in life, one thing that we can predict with absolute certainty is that there will be change and that is exactly what I experienced in this course.

Ironically, despite having over three decades of experience in information technology, I had no affinity for using social media at the beginning of this course. It is not that I was unaware of social media tools such as Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, I simply had not made the investment or traversed the learning curve to use them. Perhaps the perceived value was too low for me or perhaps I preferred the privacy of not always being connected to the rest of the world; in many respects, I truly was a newbie. I was the last person in my class to set up my Twitter account which, to be honest, required prompting from the instructor. I waffled between which blogging application to use. I even questioned my own change resiliency as I began to blog, tweet, and engage in my new socially connected world. Suddenly, I became an active participant in this open, collaborative, and global workspace.

The course design was well conceived. There was a distinct starting point and a sense of direction, with the course syllabus serving as the roadmap, as we navigated a variety of topics focused on communicating and collaborating in a digitally connected world where we were no longer bound by time or geographic location. These contemporary topics challenged us to think differently about 21^st century leadership where leaders must become social artists characterized by their social learning capability (Martin, 2015).

In contrast to my other courses that used discussion boards as a method of learner engagement, the blogging forum prompted an inquiry focus centered on human behavioral change. Questions such as: “How do we become agile learners who can readily adapt to the accelerating pace of technological change?” or “How do we effectively lead teams of people, who are geographically dispersed, in an era of instant communication and collaboration?” were an integral part of our weekly debates. Rather than memorize and recite facts, the instructional design of this course challenged us to formulate and test hypotheses, make and refine arguments, build on our prior knowledge, draw upon our own life experiences, and correct our misconceptions about the impact of technological change, all in “the real world” outside of the confines of a limited course platform and available for others to see and interact (Kelly, 2018; Mintz, 2020).

One of the challenges of asynchronous online education involves engaging and inspiring students in the process of self-discovery. The instructor used a variety of techniques to create a robust learning experience for his students. For example, there are a variety of online blogging tools available today; rather than being prescriptive about which application to use, the instructor provided an assortment of choices and let students choose between them based upon their personal preferences. Having no prior experience with blogging, I tested multiple applications before choosing Google’s Blogger. Blogger offers a variety of themes and page design customizations. I purposefully selected a mountainous background for my blog to reflect the uphill climb that I was about to attempt. Similarly, the instructor shared his own experience with blogging but provided students with the freedom to choose their own online presence by using their actual name or an alias for anonymity. Ironically, a longtime classmate did choose an alias and I frequently had to remind myself not to disclose his real identity in my responses to his blog posts.

In my experience, blogging is comparable to painting in that you begin with a blank canvas, or new blog post, in which there are no rules, guidelines, or structure. Your blog post can be anything that you want it to be. As a learner who prefers structure, I found starting a blog post to be a challenge; however, I followed a similar pattern to what I used in prior courses in that I completed the assigned readings, queried and reviewed the scientific literature, created an outline of key discussion points, and used Microsoft Word to initially write the content of my blog post. I could just have easily authored my blog post within my blogging application, and I suspect that many users do, but I preferred the format flexibility and familiarity of Microsoft Word. I used a simple copy/paste to transform my blog post from Microsoft Word to Blogger and then published my post. Classmates and the instructor readily added their own comments by using the “Reply” feature within my blog. Moreover, users could reply to an existing “reply” to form a nested conversation. In contrast to the traditional discussion board, I found blogging to be more informal, spontaneous, and engaging. It was comparable to having a face-to-face conversation with someone where there are opportunities for open dialog, interchange, improvisation, and serendipity (Mintz, 2020). Blogging provided an inviting forum for peer commentary and prompted a collaborative exchange of thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and opinions without adhering to a prescribed format – except for American Psychological Association (APA) formatting of references, of course (APA, 2020)!

In this course, we used Twitter as a collaborative platform for instant messaging with one another on topics related to technology innovation and change. The brevity and impromptu nature of “tweeting” is comparable to having a verbal conversation with an audience, or a group of followers, who are not physically present. Each week throughout the semester, we engaged in conversation via Twitter, we shared our thoughts and ideas, posted hyperlinks to relevant journal articles or other topic-related references, and shared our personal experiences in using technology to enhance communication and collaboration within our workplace. In essence, using Twitter created a virtual classroom for us where we were all present and could engage with our instructor in an informal conversation; we could ask questions, solicit input on a challenging issue that we were facing, and learn from one another’s collective experience. These first-person interactions helped me to feel connected to my classmates and the instructor. While I likely spent more time than necessary composing my tweets, I found this informal interaction among our class participants to be one of the most valuable parts of this course and I continue to follow my instructor and classmates on Twitter today.

There is an overwhelming abundance of information shared each day via social media; so much so, in fact, that it is imperative to filter out the “noise” and to selectively choose what is most important to the user. Turning off unwanted notifications, organizing content by topic, and choosing who or what to follow are important features to look for when choosing a social media management tool. To help save time and reduce user frustration, I selected TweetDeck to manage my social media presence on Twitter. TweetDeck enabled me to easily follow the conversations within this course and to stay abreast of related topics such as #technology and #leadership.

As I reflect upon my learning experience in this course, it is important to remember that not only are we participants in this digital era of innovation, but we are also leaders of other people within our organizations. Being a leader carries significant responsibilities: we must hold ourselves accountable for embracing and adapting to change, be open to new ideas, demonstrate a willingness to learn new things, and listen carefully to what others say. In part, the future of technological innovation is up to us; we may choose to be a bystander and let the tide of change overtake us or we may choose to engage in it, embrace it, and encourage others to do the same.

At the time when I took this course, the world was not immersed in the global coronavirus pandemic; the thought of wearing a face mask in public, adhering to appropriate social distancing, or minimizing my risk of exposure to an infectious disease never crossed my mind. Yet the world has changed dramatically during the pandemic; the use of social media has skyrocketed as we attempt to stay connected, informed, engaged, and safe amidst a world of uncertainty. I could not have predicted the value of this course and how important my use of social media has become in keeping me connected to other people throughout the world – both professionally and personally.

A Nursing Professional New to Blogging

Kirk mentioned that he was in information technology. This is Ashley Fedan and my field is nursing. Our course in an interdisciplinary doctoral program fostered the exchange of ideas, thoughts and outlooks. This course reminded me of the ease of online communications and application utilization. While I am fluent in many of the social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and others, I was not a blogger. Through the course, I found blogging created a great environment for idea sharing. Unlike other social media platforms, I felt that my work was more substantial in thought; that I could write meaningful essays that could enhance others’ processes or challenge established beliefs. The always on automated alerts, advertisements, and instant messages for me enhanced rather than distracted from reading the work posted by my colleagues. The blog platform permitted a freedom to extend outside of writing papers to find my voice and style, providing meaning and focus to my coursework.

The publication of my personal blog site was not without challenges, but mostly because of user error. I resorted to a screenshot of my blog posts to verify my work because a few of my posts would not appear in the comment section of certain blogs. My instructor was amendable to the unusual method of assignment submission, modeling the need to be flexible in change and adopting technology when it is of benefit! The Twitter-verse also had its challenges simply because I had utilized other venues of social media and felt my screen time was already saturated. Social media could be addictive, constantly present, and, potentially detrimental to the health individuals and, with the infiltration of outside influence, to the health of the country (Singer & Brooking, 2018). Twitter became my basis of knowledge sharing as time elapsed. I appreciated the need to be succinct in posts as it offered a newer writing skillset. Interacting with classmates was easy and felt less burdensome than the LMS platform used in our regular courses. Because I work in the operative suite, Twitter was easier to utilize during breaks or between surgical cases making the coursework more accessible. Because of this experience, my Facebook use, other than for tracking my professional advocacy, has declined dramatically. For those entering organizational leadership I now encourage Twitter as a method of communicating ideas and policies, as it demands a simple, succinct message with the potential for  interaction on a much larger scale.

I have shared the article links suggested by classmates in this course with several individuals, as I found these especially timely given the coming artificial intelligence (AI) revolution (Aoun, 2017). As a healthcare provider, if we aren’t on the crest of the technology wave, we are doomed to be crushed by it. As with many professions and trades, our workplace skills can become obsolete within two generations (Chopra-McGowan & Reddy, 2020). With this in mind, I promote acceptance over fear in the adoption of technology.

One topic we discussed in this class that resonated with me was the idea of collective knowledge management (Dixon, 2011). I prefer networking and agility over hierarchy, and today’s digital world up ends the traditional hierarchy, where knowledge tended to exist at the top. In healthcare, the “Captain of the Ship” mentality is slowly evolving to a networking structure, which in turn saves patient lives while decreasing healthcare costs (Hughes et al., 2016). The recent pandemic has demonstrated the need for lateral communication of staff and hospital administration. Lack of guidance from an established hierarchy allowed a more horizontal and lateral model to thrive in various states, hospitals, surgery centers, and clinics, similar to the wirearchy suggested by Jon Husband (n.d.). For instance, the World Heath Organization (WHO) has promoted the surgical safety checklist which ensures each member of the surgical team has an equal role in patient safety (WHO, n.d.). I was not surprised by the concept, but was surprised to find that this interconnected flow of information (modelled by this course, in fact) had a name and literature associated with it (Dixon, 2011, Husband, n.d., Jarche, 2013).

We used blogging for in our interdisciplinary discussions of how to apply the various topics and concepts, which for me made it more non-threatening. As a student of leadership, I appreciated the examples shared by fellow students of the application of technology and the real-world practice with both benefits and drawbacks. I learned a great deal from other students about how they manage change in their organization as well. As the months have passed since completing the course, many of the lessons have been beneficial to the various centers where I practice anesthesia. The current COVID-19 pandemic has mandated a nimble culture of change throughout the healthcare system in my home state. While many of the regulations have been mandated, the implementation of those changes for the safety of our colleagues and patients has been challenging. My world almost overnight saw changes that involved personal protective equipment, screening tools, and testing utilized various forms of technology. It would be challenging to imagine managing these changes in a COVID pandemic without the application of technology.

Even though the focus was on leadership, I recognized that this class was in many ways a technology course. When adopting a new format or program at work, I expect some stressful moments; my expectations for the course were similar. I was grateful that my instructor offered grace with the learning curve. Nursing, as a profession, is not as gracious or understanding. What surprised me in this experience was the applicability of the topics and how they influenced many aspects of my professional and daily life. Throughout history, words evolved from an oral tradition to written pages, and now to digital media—a phenomenon that Kelly (2016) described as moving from being ‘people of the book’ to ‘people of the screen.’ One of the twelve tech forces that Kelly (2016) listed as shaping our future was “screening” – millions of digital screens from IMAX size to Apple Watchs. I now see “Screening” everywhere – the use of digital media through various screens truly surrounds us. When I listen to music, the sampling is notable in the production of songs. AI now surfaces when I write orders for patients. It was something I had known but this course made me more truly aware of and keen to its infiltration into our daily lives. As a leader, it has made me more accepting of the networking processes. The old top-down method of filtered information flow up and down the chain was inefficient and often lacked input from stakeholders. New digital ways of communicating opens infinite possibilities. This course has made me more aware of constant evolution and technology as a reflective leader. I hope to empower others with acceptance over fear in the future.

Scholarly Commentary

Community of Inquiry

A primary theoretical context for this class was the Community of Inquiry framework illustrated in Figure 2 (Garrison et al.,1999; Garrison, 2017). The learning experience is expressed through three overlapping presences.

Community of Inquiry Model

Note. Elements of an educational experience. From “CoI Framework” at https://coi.athabascau.ca/coi-model/. Used with permission of D. R. Garrison.

Cognitive Presence is the extent to which learners construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse. Teaching Presence is the design and facilitation of learning driven by specific outcomes. Finally, Social Presence is the ability of participants to identify with a trusted community and see other participants as “real.” In their narratives, both Kirk and Ashley alluded to this sense of community.

Several studies have reinforced the importance of the faculty member’s social presence in an online learning environment (Garrison, 2017; Palloff & Pratt, 2007; Richardson & Swan, 2003; Rovai & Barnum, 2003). Whereas face-to-face communication has the most social presence and text on a page has the least, online courses fall in between. It takes conscious thought and action for students to see the faculty (and each other) as “real” people in their online class. Both Kirk and Ashley noted that Twitter helped in this regard.  Palloff and Pratt (2007) stated that the key to the learning processes “… are the interactions among students themselves, the interactions between faculty and students, and the collaboration in learning that results from these interactions” (p. 4).

Student-faculty contact does not just occur spontaneously but is the result of active participation and interaction by instructors with their online students. Mupinga et al. (2006) noted that frequent communication with the instructor puts the online students at ease to reassure them they are not missing anything or that they are not alone in cyberspace. Interaction with online instructors has also been correlated with increased learning. Students with the highest levels of interaction with the instructor also had the highest levels of learning, according to Frederickson et al. (2000).

Several researchers have also noted that teaching presence – which they defined as course design and organization, the facilitation of learning, and direct instruction – is a significant determinate of student satisfaction, perceived learning, and sense of community (Akyol & Garrison, 2008; Arbaugh, 2008; Shea et al., 2004). In this class, we found that social media added to the perceived presence of both the course instructor and individual students and was therefore critical to the success of this class and ultimately students’ learning. As alluded to by both Kirk and Ashley, the combination of near real time connections through Twitter and spaced dialogue through blog commenting helped me and the students see each other as “real,” opening levels of trust that improved the sharing of leadership lessons and led to deeper learning by all.

Some tend to think that online classes are cold and isolating, but researchers have found that social media communication can be just as personal, if not more so, than old school communications such as phone calls or in-person meetings (Conley & Sabo, 2015; Gray & DiLoreto, 2016; Griesemer, 2012). The literature on social presence suggests that instructors and students can create and maintain a sense of social presence through the following strategies (Rourke et al., 2001):

• Expression of emotions
• Self-disclosure
• Continuing a thread
• Quoting from other messages
• Referring explicitly to other messages
• Asking questions
• Complimenting, expressing appreciation
• Expressing agreement
• Vocatives (i.e., referring to participants by name)
• Addresses or refers to the group using inclusive pronouns
• Phatics / Salutations (i.e., communication that is purely social)

Social media facilitates all these processes.

Constructivist Learning

While the Community of Inquiry provided the framework for developing this class, the weekly lessons followed a constructivist approach to learning. In constructivism, people construct their own understanding through exploration, and the weekly blog prompts aligned with this practice (Harasim, 2012, Siemens & Weller, 2011). Kirk noted that this process allowed him to build on prior knowledge and correct misconceptions.  Given that this was an interdisciplinary class, the sharing of learning through open blog posts promoted reflection on the applicability of each student’s findings in their respective domains. Churcher et al. (2014) postulated that new media technologies provided pedagogical best practices for a social constructivist approach to learning.

Connected Learning

Terry Heick (2020) noted that social media had the potential to increase the transparency of the learning process to promote not only accountability, but true community, increasing net capacity for all stakeholders. This tied to the idea of connectional intelligence, which Leberecht (2015) highlighted as a way to drive innovation and breakthroughs by harnessing the power of networks. Kirk mentioned that he found “…blogging to be more informal, spontaneous, and engaging.” Kevin Kelly (2018) described this connectiveness as a  “superpower of humans connected to one another in real time” given the unprecedented access to knowledge and culture the internet allows.  Kirk appreciated his being an active participant in “…this open, collaborative, and global workspace.”  Ashley remarked how “…digital ways of communicating opens infinite possibilities.”  In small ways, I and my students experienced this superpower of human digital connectiveness.

We live in a messy world filled with decentralized and oversaturated information sources (Gogia, 2016). Researchers have suggested that digital age learners need to live in this noisy world, incorporating connected learning into their learning experiences (Beetham & Sharpe, 2013, Downes, 2004, Siemens & Weller, 2011). Blogging and commenting on each other’s work fostered collaborative learning and brought the noisy digital world into our classroom. Research has shown that learning:

“…is enhanced when it is more like a team effort than a solo race. Good learning, like good work, is collaborative and social, not competitive and isolated. Working with others often increases involvement in learning. Sharing one’s own ideas and responding to others’ reactions improves thinking and deepens understanding” (Chickering and Gamson, 1987, p. 1).

Good teaching online is no different than good teaching face-to-face, in that effective teaching incorporates each of these practices. Chickering and Ehrmann (1996) expanded on these principles to illustrate that technology can be a lever to implementing these principles.  Our narratives above illustrate that the social web can be used effectively for learning.

Summary

The 2020 pandemic brought increased scrutiny on the efficacy of elearning. Online learning works best when those instructing and those being instructed connect. In the course discussed in this chapter, we used blogs and Twitter to connect, creating what Chang and Guetti (2007) termed an elearning ecosystem. The use of tweets to set the stage, followed by reflective posts and rich discussions through tweet responses and blog comments created a metacognitively rich class. Kirk’s observation of the class participants becoming social artists nicely captures the engagement that occurred. All the parts were required for the process to work, but as the narratives from the instructor and students note, the addition of social media promoted new approaches to graduate learning that enhanced the experience for both the instructor and students.

Discussion Questions

1. What properties are unique to social media that could enhance a course you teach or take?
2. How should social media be integrated such that it is integral to the learning environment and not just an add-on?
3. In making student posts visible on the open web, what do your students gain and what challenges may arise?
4. For faculty, what professional challenges (e.g., privacy, intellectual property, academic freedom) arise from connecting with students outside the LMS?

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A post-script – If I was teaching this class today, I would be using BlueSky rather than X into which Twitter evolved.  I still see value in using blogs over discussion forums.  Having these leadership students discuss hard concepts on the open web is in itself a learning experience.

This approaches a “tl’dr” scenario, but as always, I would be interested in your thoughts!

{Graphics: DALL-E, Watwood, 38 Special, Garrison, Watwood}