Facebook

The new VLE?

Ask students if they regularly use your VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) and you might be lucky if you get 50%. Ask them how many are using social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace, the figure probably hits more like 90%. This was worrying. Our department, like any, is always looking for new ways to reach students on their level and provide as much support as possible.

What started as a joke between myself and a colleague suddenly became a very plausible idea.

Why couldn’t we use Facebook as our own supplementary VLE?

So like all good Psychologists, we hypothesized and created our own pilot test under the name of Franklin Psych (or Frank Psycho as the students prefer). We set ourselves a few basic ground rules and then created our account. The results were positive. Within weeks our students had found and added us onto their friends’ lists.
We had set boundaries beforehand so anyone adding us onto their list was aware of what it would entail to have their teachers on their private account. Obviously, with all new programmes, there are issues that need to be resolved but with careful management, this can be a useful tool.

I am not suggesting by any means that networking sites such as Facebook are substitutes for VLEs or should replace them completely. I am simply suggesting that these systems can be harnessed and used as supplementary programmes that can improve communication with students. Below I have written a quick ‘How to’ guide for setting up your own account for your department.

Facebook – A ‘How to’ guide

Think of a good name for your Facebook account. You also need an e-mail address for this to work. We decided that we didn’t want it to be our personal e-mail account so we created an e-mail account on Hotmail that the whole department has access too.
The whole department also has access to the Facebook account so that anyone can check it at any one time.

Rules for yourself

Set yourself some simple rules that you want to follow. For example, you may wish to only have Psychology students on your friends’ list. You might also want to agree on times when you are going to access it, for example for an hour three times a week, etc. We also ensured that as we have personal accounts with Facebook, our students could not access these with links to our department account.

Chat facilities

The rule we use on this is that we never start conversations with students unless they start them with us. We also do not comment on their status updates.

Rules for students

Strictly a ‘no abuse’ policy. If anyone is offensive, they are deleted from our lists immediately. Depending on the level of abuse, we have also informed students that they may face an inquiry within college, depending on the severity of the case. All students are informed of these rules before adding us on Facebook. You may also wish to remind your students that you will see their status updates so it is not the best idea to post that you are missing college when your teachers can see.

Quizzes

There are some excellent quiz facilities on Facebook. You can create simply multiple choice questions or add more detailed questions using the ‘notes’ section on your homepage. We have noticed that students get competitive on the scoreboard which leads to them trying the quizzes more often. We also often put practice exam questions up and students e-mail them in or bring them into lessons to discuss them.

Links

You can add some important links on this section such as links to the exam boards, journal articles, etc.

Status Updates

We have often used these to advertise extra classes, trips and even posted research questions and used this as a forum for debates.

Photos

If your students agree, you can put trip photos up so students can look at them.

Laura Rudd