To understand why Facebook’s unveiling of Student Groups didn’t send higher-education technologists into a tizzy, it might be helpful to examine the case of Oberlin College in Ohio, where 95 percent of its Student Groups have seen no student activity since they were made live in a pilot program that started in early March.
Facebook’s April 11 announcement, making Student Groups public after pilot programs on college campuses across the country, harkens back to the social network’s younger days, when members had to have “.edu” eMail addresses to create a Facebook account.
Student Groups will allow students and faculty members on hundreds of campuses to make private group pages that will be off limits to Facebook members outside the campus community. Students can share files–homework or class projects, perhaps–and interact with fellow students even if they’re not friends of the social network.
But Oberlin, a private liberal arts college of 2,800 students, has had access to Student Groups since early March. Since then, students and faculty have created 128 Student Groups pages–ranging from Class of 2016 pages to pages for science students–with the most popular group drawing 280 students, Ma’ayan Plaut, an Oberlin social media coordinator, wrote in an April 11 blog post.
More than half of those 280 Oberlin College groups have fewer than five members, many of them with the group’s creator as its lone member.
Plaut said college students might lack enthusiasm for creating and participating in Facebook Student Groups because, for them, Facebook is an escape from the burden of academia, not an extension of it.
“Other than adding classmates to the group and posting about a lost item and an event or two, the groups are about dead as their curated incoming class pages that were created when they matriculated,” she wrote. “Perhaps the rules are a bit too open-ended, or we’ve reached a saturation point with social grouping, or maybe it’s just that Facebook just can’t dictate how we create our social groups.”
Some Oberlin Student Groups were created automatically when the feature was made available at the college. One of those automatic groups, about jobs and internships, didn’t have any way of connecting interested students with companies and organizations.
“How about letting us share our internship database and career services social connection on Twitter and Tumblr instead?” Plaut wrote. “This is a blow in the gut for me.”
The most noticed oversight in Facebook’s Student Groups rollout was the inability for prospective and incoming students to join groups, such as pages designed for specific majors.
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