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Bringing the Twitter experiment to Ashesi’s Classrooms

Twitter, and other social media, has seen a big surge in user growth over the last few years. More recently schools and tertiary institutions have started to embrace the platform as an educational tool. With the use of Twitter hashtags (#) and course-specific Twitter accounts, teachers have found that they now have a new way to better communicate with students and share information with them beyond the classroom and office hours. Some of Ashesi’s lecturers have joined this movement, as more of their students get in the habit of social media engagement.

Dr. Astrid Twenebowa Larssen, who teaches Software Engineering, Design and Human-Computer Interaction, represents Ashesi’s poster girl when it comes to social media in the university’s classrooms. “I found out that many of my students were tweeting in class, and I thought: if they’re tweeting anyway, why not get them to tweet about the course or course material?” Rather than clamp down on the use of technology in the classroom, Dr. Larssen and her Faculty Intern Andria Abraham ‘11, are encouraging their students to see technology as a way of engaging with the course material and an aid to class interaction. And it seems to be working.

Andrew Nunekpeku and his Faculty Intern, Edward Opoku ‘11, who picked up on Dr. Larssen’s Twitter experiment, are exploring the use of social media for teacher-student interaction as well. Andrew and Edward first thought of integrating Twitter into his class after Edward stumbled on a discussion by some of his students on the social media platform. “I found that students were asking each other questions on Twitter that they didn’t ask during class,” says Edward. I thought that I could engage them more if I extended the discussion to Twitter.”

Keeping The Discussion Going

In the Quantitative Methods class, Edward came up with a hashtag that he and Andrew use to curate tweets for the class. “I constantly monitor the class hashtag, and make sure I respond to questions from students as soon as I see them. It is a quick way to help students with problems with their assignments and class projects, and to get involved with them when they’re having study group discussions.” Dr. Larssen however, is encouraging students to tweet during class as well, not just out of class.

For her Software Engineering class for example, members are allowed and encouraged to tweet questions and comments about the class content or the lecture while the class is ongoing. She then addresses the questions either verbally (or on Twitter) or after class. “I encourage the class to tweet their comments and questions using our class hashtag. I’ve noticed that students who otherwise are not too active in class contribute more.”

Using the class hashhtag, Dr. Larssen and her students also share course-related material on Twitter. Because she’s allowing comments and questions via Twitter during class, Dr. Larssen takes this into account when grading students for class participation.

“The twitter integration allows us to share our thoughts on a statement that the lecturer (or presenter) just made without actually having to interrupt the flow of the class.” says Bernard Ghartey ‘12, who is in Dr. Larssen’s Software Engineering class. “Using the class hashtag, we are able to invite other Ashesi students (and other friends) to join in the class discussion and share their ideas too. It’s like a global classroom!”

Maureen Biney ‘12, agrees with Bernard’s idea of the global classroom also. “Sometimes we have people who contribute meaningfully to our class via Twitter and bring a lot of insight. It’s like they are having an informal class audit.”

“The students in my class have reacted well to the use of Twitter for discussion,” says Edward. “As the use of Twitter grows, I notice that we’re beginning to have a more interactive class. And unlike before when we had to schedule regular office hours for discussions with students (which they were not using too often), students can now ask questions pretty much at anytime and from anywhere.” Edward also uses Twitter to send out timely reminders to students about assignment and project deadlines. The classes that have integrated Twitter have also installed widgets in their respective Courseware (Ashesi’s course management system) sections to allow students who don’t have Twitter accounts to keep up with the conversation and the information being shared.

Encouraging Students to Blog

Each year, Dr. Larssen requires students in her Software Engineering class to read a course related book and write a review on it. In her previous years, students wrote their reviews in an essay format, gave a class presentation and presented printed copies for grading.

This year however, Dr. Larssen moved the class book reviews to the WordPress blogging platform. Each student is given login details for the blog, and is required to post their book reviews there. One of the main goals of the book reviews is to expose the students to more reading material than could have been possible for them to cover individually and encourage the students to read in their profession.

The use of a blog meets these goals as it makes the material in the book more available to other students by making it easy to share more amongst the class. The presentation was substituted by panel discussion of 4-6 books at a time, which has also increased engagement with the readings. As a way of getting students to actively use the blog in the future, Dr. Larssen plans to make it part of the assessment for students to post comments on book review posts submitted by their classmates. It is her hope that this would further enable sharing, engagement and drive student discussions on the book reviews.

Moving Forward

Even though students are willing to participate in Twitter class discussions, there are still hurdles that Ashesi’s teachers (and students) are going to have to find a way around. One of these problems would be finding ways to ensure that students are not completely distracted from the class while sending out tweets. “I must admit that, it breaks my attention slightly when I have to read tweets, respond and pass comments and make updates, so I limit it. But that’s just me,” says Bernard. Lecturers are going to have to find a way to make it such that while creating a stream of discussion online, students still maintain a healthy presence in class. Yet, the Twitter experiment is only in its early stages in Ashesi, and with the good reception it’s getting so far it will ultimately allow for more creative exploration of social media in Ashesi – a good move for today’s digital classroom.

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