A Preliminary Summative Assessment of the HigherEd 2.0 Program - Using Social Media in Engineering Education

The HigherEd 2.0 (HED2.0) program initiated in 2006, and the research team developed and evaluated pedagogical techniques for integrating social media (what we used to call web 2.0) tools into engineering education. Inspired by the 2006/2007 rapid adoption of podcasting for entertainment, news, and other non-academic purposes, the HED2.0 program sought: (i) to integrate various social media tools into the fabric of engineering undergraduate classrooms, (ii) to evaluate the program using mixed methods and targeting various specific outcomes, and (iii) to develop best practices for deployment of social media tools in support of student learning. The HED2.0 program has focused on the use of blogs, video technologies (including podcasts), and student-generated content as powerful and productive pedagogical tools. This paper reports on a preliminary summative assessment of the program, its outcomes, its successes, and its challenges. Throughout the program, a mixed-methods evaluation approach was used, and it focused on a variety of factual factors (usage data, download statistics), survey response data from students, faculty and student interviews, and student gradebook data. While the full summative assessment of the program is beyond the scope of this conference paper, this preliminary presentation focuses on several specific aspects of the program. First we consider student response to the idea of using social media for teaching and learning, and in particular we examine student attitudes about, and usage of, the social media resources across multiple years of the program. What we learn is that student response to the program follows a somewhat predictable diffusion of innovations framework, and we present data from student surveys, factual usage data, and interviews with students. Second, we examine the relationships between student usage and engagement with HED 2.0 technologies and their performance on specific assessments in the course, including homeworks, quizzes, and exams. We characterize several model student profiles based upon the apparent impact of technology usage on their academic performance. Finally, we examine the role of incentives in shaping student use of the social media resources. Based upon different approaches to incentivizing usage, ranging from no incentives to some measure of course credit, we can conclude that students generally require an initial motivation to engage with what is (for most students) an entirely new framework for learning. However, after students gain experience with the HED2.0 techniques, they require far fewer incentives to continue their engagement with the social media tools.