The Facebook Page Experiment: An Update

Screen capture of data analysis available for our Facebook Page – taken August 15th, 4 weeks into classes.

Well it’s been four weeks since I wrote this post about how to use Facebook to support teaching and learning with a class. Since then, my colleagues and I have started a Facebook Page with a class of pre-service teachers in their second semester of a four year teacher education program at the University of Wollongong. The class is a science methods class for pre-service elementary teachers which meets in a lecture once a week for two hours and in a small group tutorials once a week for an hour. We were interested in how the Facebook Page could be used to improve communication with the students and to hopefully encourage interaction between students around course related content.

Here’s what has happened so far:

  • The course has about 200 students enrolled and to date 116 have ‘liked’ the page which means they will receive notifications of page activity in their news feed. About 80 students immediately ‘liked’ the page and then a couple a day have added themselves since.
  • To introduce the page to the students I did a short 15 minute spiel with them about the use of social media for professional learning in education. I discussed the possibilities of using Twitter to build a professional learning network and blogging for reflection and sharing. This was done on the first day of class. We told students how we would be using the page (as a place to post announcements and links, but also as a place for them to carry out conversations). I also posted a note on the page detailing guidelines for the professional use of social media.
  • Throughout the course we have been posting links that are relevant to what is happening in their lectures and tutorials. The students had a field trip to the local science center in the second week, so pictures were added from that event. Students were also asked to post pictures and videos of their hands on tutorial activities.
  • Facebook Pages provides very interesting information once you have 30 members. The picture above is an example of data that can be accessed.
  • Firstly you can see the activity counts over time. From the graph above you can see that at the beginning there is a spike in activity, peaking in the second week when pictures of the science center trip were posted. The green line is the ‘people talking about this’ statistic, which is the number of stories generated from likes, comments and responses. The purple dots are the number of posts.
  • You can get detailed information for each post. You can see how many people have ‘seen’ any given post. This is called the ‘reach’ of a post.  It is the number of unique people who have seen the post either in their newsfeed or from visiting the Page.
  • There are separate statistics for ‘engaged’ users, who are users who did something with the post. Engaged users can click on a post, like a post or share a post. Above I ranked the posts by the number of engaged users. The photos from the Science Center had the widest reach and the most engaged users. Engaged users is further broken down into – photo views, other clicks (such as clicks on people’s names), and stories generated. Stories generated has a special status, this is the ultimate in FB engagement. Anytime a story is generated it will appear in a person’s newsfeed stream which means their friends can see that they engaged with the post. Stories are generated when someone likes a post, comments on a post, or shares a post. Stories generated is also summarized in the third column of the data table.
  • So, interestingly, even at the university level – photos have generated the most activity. The top three posts were all photo related.
  • So far the number of stories that have been generated by posts is fairly limited.
  • Students have started to post interesting links on the page. We are hoping more of this happens in the future.
  • During one lecture I posted a couple of reminders that came up during the lecture. About a third of the members viewed the posts during the lecture.

So far I would classify our experiment as successful. Students are using the page to get information and it has improved communication between students and the instructors. From what we’ve learned so far I would recommend posting pictures on the page in the first few weeks of classes. This will help to get the ball rolling. At the university level I thought that this was a bit cheesy, but in fact photos is on of the primary ways that students interact on Facebook.  Hopefully as students start to have assignments due they will connect with each other on this forum to support one another. We’ll see.

Last week I visited a high school and met some high school teachers who were successfully using Facebook with their students. They were drama and music teachers who also coordinated a lot of extra curricular activities with these same students, however the Facebook groups that they set up were for their classes. Although I said in my last post that you can’t run a Facebook Group (as opposed to a Page) with students without being ‘friends’ with them, I was wrong. You can. These teachers have set up the group, told the students where to find it and the students ask to become members of the group. So the teachers don’t need to ‘invite’ students to be in the group. Student can invite each other (if they are friends). The teacher approves all group members. So far the groups have been extremely successful. Students share videos of their performances, converse with each other, share links and communicate with their teacher. The teacher posts pictures from class (like a picture of a drawing or notes from the board) and announcements. Some guidelines have been set up – students are not allowed to ‘private message’ the teacher.  The teacher considers her Facebook inbox as a personal space. Also students know that any inappropriate comments etc… will be seen and shown to the principal if posted. So far they have not had any problems with inappropriate behaviour or bullying in the groups. However this has definitely been an issue for some teachers that I’ve talked to. Finally there are one or two students in the classes who aren’t on Facebook. The teacher has found that when something is posted, students will phone those who aren’t on Facebook and make sure that they are informed. This teacher uses Facebook as something extra to enhance interaction between herself and her students outside of class. For interactions within class she uses Edmodo because Facebook is blocked at the school. I will write a post about that later.

This is getting to be a super long post but there is just one more thing I wanted to mention while I’m on the topic of Facebook. I recently read a couple of research papers about the use of social media to improve students’ perceptions (at the higher education level) of instructor credibility. One study found that students who read social (or personal) tweets of an instructor ranked the instructor as higher on a credibility scale than students who viewed scholarly or academic tweets, or students who viewed both kinds of tweets (Johnson, 2011). Another study found a similar result using Facebook. Students ranked a teacher who had ‘high self disclosure’ on Facebook as more credible than a teacher who had ‘low self disclosure’ (Mazur et al., 2009). Research has shown that teachers who are more enthusiastic about sharing personal information are perceived by students as being more effective. Other studies have shown that students’ perceptions of their instructors’ effectiveness has a positive impact on their success in the course. Ergo, if teachers can establish rapport in this way, students benefit. So this may be yet another reason to possibly venture into using social networking as a teaching tool.

Johnson, K.A. (2011). The effect of Twitter on students’ perceptions of instructor credibility. Learning, Media and Technology, 36(1), 21-38.

Mazur, J.P., Murphy, R.E., & Simonds, C.J. (2009). The effects of teacher self-disclosure via Facebook on teacher credibility. Learning, Media and Technology, 34(2), 175-183.

2 thoughts on “The Facebook Page Experiment: An Update

  1. Pingback: Facebook Pages for Teachers 101 | Social Media Science

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