Being able to maximize college students’ use of social media toward learning is going to be a skill higher education professionals will need to master in order to effectively engage our students. Unfortunately, many university faculty and administrators see social media as a mere waste of time and antithetical to the goals and mission of higher education. On Friday, April 20, 2012 at 2:00pm (EST), I presented a webinar titled Using Social Media to Enhance Student Learning Outcomes as hosted by StudentAffairs.com.

The webinar covered strategies for using social media to develop student learning outcomes as well as how to formulate a plan to assess learning outcomes using such social media platforms as Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress. Here is a small sample of social media learning strategies that was covered during the webinar:

Blogging Learning Strategies:

• Use WordPress as a platform to publish educational information
• Mine blog comments as qualitative and quantitative data

Twitter Learning Strategies:

• Utilize unique hashtags for specific classes and programs
• Employ the “One Minute Paper”: Students will tweet the most important item learned and one remaining question they have
• Teach “Back Channel” discussion so students can summarize lessons learned from the class or program

Facebook Learning Strategies:

• “Piggyback” efforts using blogging, YouTube, and Twitter to post educational links and videos on your Facebook page
• Use “Surveys” and “Likes” as a means to acquire data

This webinar, using CAS standards to develop learning outcomes, demonstrates how college and university student affairs administrators can harness the power of social media as a vehicle for developing, enhancing, and assessing student learning outcomes.

I encourage you and your department colleagues to attend this affordable webinar. Please click HERE to see more details and to register for the replay of this webinar.