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Using Social Media as an Educational Tool: The Potential Role of Twitter in Enhancing the Student Learning Experience in Neuro/Anatomy
Author(s) -
Hennessy Catherine,
Border Scott
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.29.1_supplement.lb12
Subject(s) - feeling , cohort , social media , psychology , medical education , virtual learning environment , medicine , computer science , world wide web , pedagogy , social psychology
Background Since the rise in tuition fees the value of the student experience has become more important than ever. Difficult areas of medical degree programmes like neuroanatomy can often leave students feeling disengaged and unsupported. More recently the use of social media, such as Twitter has been used in higher education to increase engagement and offer a supportive online community for the learning of challenging subjects. At the University of Southampton, we incorporated the use of Twitter as a way of supporting students learning on a neuroanatomy module to see how it impacted upon their engagement and learning experience. Aims To investigate if Twitter can be used to engage and support medical students while learning neuroanatomy and to identify how it is used by students. Method The nlm2soton hashtag was created and was displayed (via a widget) on the University's Virtual Learning Environment (Blackboard) for a cohort of 203 BM5 Year 2 medical students studying neuroanatomy. Student usage was tracked to measure levels of engagement throughout the course. Results 62% of the cohort viewed the widget with on average 30 hits per day. A 16% increase in the widget's daily hits coincided with the January revision period. 33% of the cohort tweeted or favoured tweets which were themed as follows: Shared learning (29%), Morale boosts (28%), Questions (23%), Worries (16%) and Information (4%). Conclusion Incorporating the use of Twitter on this module was successful. Although only a third of students contributed their own tweets, almost two‐thirds of the cohort regularly monitored the feed for updates. Sharing learning tips and interestingly, contributions intended to raise spirits were the most common.