Do Social Media Tools Promote Classroom Collaboration?

Carla Bevins, Tepper School Assistant Teaching Professor of Business Communications, speaks about her research on social media and collaboration.

Video Transcript

So my research is a little bit different than some of the other research that's coming out of Tepper right now. Instead of necessarily creating an algorithm or developing a whole new model, my research focuses more on the practical application of what we can do with instructional design in the classroom.

One of my recent papers is focusing on social media and collaboration, and we looked at wikis — use of wikis in the classroom. A wiki is basically an online tool that you can use kind of like a discussion board, except it's more free-flowing than that. And so students could post on a specific business communications topic and they could see the information that everyone else was posting also. And we know that the more engaged you are in a topic, the more likely you are to collaborate with others and share that information with others and learn at a deeper level. Something as seemingly simple as using a piece of social media, a wiki, in a classroom setting really did contribute to an increase of collaboration. I guess for me it was a little surprising that it was that significant. It was that statistically significant.

We're seeing more and more technology in the classroom, and more technology isn't always better; sometimes it's just more. And one of the things that we have to do as professors and researchers is look at how we can effectively use technology in the classroom and how we can help our students learn the skills, those communication skills that they need. That's going to transfer directly across into any of the jobs and careers that they take on in the future.