Social Media as a Teaching and Learning Tool for In-class Q&A Activities to Promote Learning and Transform College Engineering Classroom Dynamics: The Case of Facebook

In this work Facebook (FB) is used as a teaching and learning tool in a college engineering course, and its perceived effects with regard to promoting learning and changing classroom dynamics were examined. A total of 42 civil engineering majored undergraduates participated in this study. A group was created in FB to be used exclusively by the participants to respond to questions of various types and with various aims, which were asked in class by the instructor. Inductive data analysis of the students´ responses to one open-ended question in the last session revealed the following positive effects of FB use for in-class Q&A activities: enhanced social interaction, more focused learning, a more amiable classroom environment, and deepened thinking about and awareness of the complexity of the focal topic. Based on the results of this work, it is suggested that college instructors may consider incorporating FB in class to support more democratic and participatory forms of dialog among participants, and thus transform the classroom dynamic into a more interactive and amiable one.