Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eCampus News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

Research: Social media has negative impact on academic performance

Perusing Facebook, sending rapid-fire text messages, and tweeting back and forth with friends and celebrities alike might not be the best academic strategy, it turns out.

A new study released by researchers at The Miriam Hospital’s Centers for Behavioral and Preventive Medicine shows a link between social media use and poor academic performance. The study wasn’t limited to usage of traditional social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook, but instead included popular social technology like texting.

Freshman women spend upwards of 12 hours a day using some form of social media, researchers found. Social networking and watching movies and TV were most negatively associated with academic performance among the study participants.…Read More

Social media still ‘fair game’ in admissions process

College admissions officers still believe it’s acceptable practice to check applicants’ social media, but the number who actually do so has declined, due in part to teenagers’ increased use of social media platforms that do not archive content.

Sixty-eight percent of colleges and universities in Kaplan Test Prep’s annual college admissions officer survey say applicant’s social media accounts are “fair game” during the admissions process. They report checking platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to get better ideas of who applicants really are and if they’re likely to be a good fit.

Kaplan conducted a separate survey of 900 high school students reveals that 70 percent of students agree that it’s fair for admissions officers to check out social activity.…Read More

How to use social media to boost your alumni network

We started doing the Instagram Takeover to showcase what life is like as a graduate of Northeastern University. Instagram Takeovers, which cultivate a stronger sense of community and connection through conversation, collaboration, and sharing ideas and stories, last for seven days—Monday to Sunday. During that time, we expect alumni to post as least one photo a day that gives our followers a look at their life. These photos do not need to be in the office: They can depict a city, hobbies, volunteer work … it’s up to them.

The idea for the Instagram Takeovers was sparked by a case study presentation made at the CASE Social Media and Community Conference in Chicago in 2016. On the last day, DePaul University shared how they would let students take over the university Instagram account for a week to share their experiences while studying abroad, working an internship, or just living on campus. As I walked out of the presentation, I started brainstorming ways to bring this behind-the-scenes concept to the alumni community. Internal support for the idea was so overwhelming that in May of 2016, I rebranded the @northeastern_alumni Instagram account to be solely alumni Instagram Takeovers. I haven’t personally posted a photo to our account in 660 days and counting.

Through this strategy, we are able to leverage passionate alumni to help us create valuable, personal content that we would not have otherwise been able to capture and share.…Read More

3 ways higher ed can avoid social media devastation

A tenured sociology professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., landed in hot water because of his activity on Facebook. A college news site found the professor’s posts—one of which included an offensive hashtag and reference to last summer’s congressional shooting in Virginia—and published them online. Instantaneously, the story sparked national attention. Trinity had to close its doors at one point as the professor and campus received death threats.

In the age of social media, incidents like this occur frequently. The solution: Colleges and universities need to proactively prevent these types of social media issues from wreaking havoc on their reputations and day-to-day activities.

Most higher-education institutions have social media policies, but applying and communicating these policies often falls into a gray area. When colleges and universities leave social media dos and don’ts open for interpretation, they leave their institutions vulnerable to unwanted controversy.…Read More

How Purdue blew fundraising records out of the water-in 1 day

Purdue University is a large research university based in West Lafayette, Indiana, and each year we host a fundraiser called Purdue Day of Giving. The event invites the Purdue community to come together for 24 hours to grant opportunities and transform lives.

In its fourth year, we knew we had to find fresh ways to interact with and engage our audience—students, alumni, parents, friends, retirees, faculty, and staff—in order for the fundraising campaign to beat last year’s numbers.

We decided to take advantage of the huge reach of social media, and conducted a coordinated campaign across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and LinkedIn—an approach that played a key role in breaking our record.…Read More

Faculty: 7 ways to avoid social media mistakes

If a tree falls in a forest…you can count on the entire social media world knowing about it.

According to faculty at various universities, there are two main ways that social networking sites are causing new concerns and considerations for faculty and institutions: frictionless sharing and context collapse.

In a report by Cassidy Sugimoto, assistant professor at the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University; Carolyn Hank, assistant professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee; Timothy Bowman, graduate student at Indiana University; and Jeffrey Pomerantz, information scientist at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; these terms are defined as:…Read More

Is your campus using this hidden recruiting gem?

Social media should be a key component of higher education institutions’ minority recruitment strategies, according to a new report.

A survey of 5,580 college-bound students reveals that underrepresented student groups are more likely than their counterparts to rely on social media such as Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram to learn about colleges.

These student groups are also more likely to interact with colleges and universities on social media throughout their college search, according to the survey by Royall & Company, a division of EAB.…Read More

The 3 biggest Twitter problems for educators—and how to overcome them

Despite clear advantages to advancing digital literacy, institutions often experience considerable roadblocks to implementing digital literacy initiatives. Interestingly, accessibility often isn’t the biggest factor blocking this process—more often than not, it comes down to an educator’s own comfort with social media.

Educators with little to no training on how to integrate digital literacy exercises into the classroom run the risk of compromising their students’ development of valuable soft skills that can produce educational and professional career advantages.

For the past three years, Rutgers Alternate Route has supported new teachers in boosting their digital literacy, by hosting edtech workshops, sharing digital resources on social media, and leading hosted discussions on LinkedIn and Twitter. After surveying 165 teachers part of these workshops, responses indicated that social media is arguably the most challenging digital tool for teachers to guide students in navigating, in large part because many school districts block students from accessing social networks when on school grounds.…Read More

College admissions now using social media like never before

According to the results of a Kaplan Test Prep survey, a higher percentage of U.S. college admissions officers visit the social media pages of applicants in order to learn more about them.

For the 2015 survey, 387 admissions officers from the nation’s top national, regional and liberal arts colleges and universities were polled by telephone between July and August 2015. It was found that 40 percent of admissions officers visit applicants’ social media profiles to research them more in depth, which represents a record high that is also quadruple the percentage of affirmative respondents from when Kaplan first explored the trend in 2008.

Amongst those 40 percent who check social media profiles, most say they “rarely” check social media, with some reporting doing so “often.”…Read More