Exploring Engineering Students’ College Experiences Using Social Media Monitoring Tool Radian6

Abstract

Students nowadays talk about their college life in various online social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and many blogs and forums. Public discourse on these social media sites can provide insights into students’ college experiences. This paper focuses on exploring the informal social media data created by students in their daily life, rather than investigating the formal usage of social media platforms in the classroom settings. Many social media monitoring tools are developed for monitoring business brands or public events. These tools may also be used to collect social media data for educational research and policy recommendation purposes. This study uses social media monitoring tool Radian6 to collect data from Twitter about engineering students’ college experiences. The data are analyzed both in Radian6 and manually using qualitative content analysis. The results shed light into the academic context and social context of engineering students’ learning experiences. This exploratory study also considers the potential of social media analytics tools for engineering education research. Social media analytics tools specifically for educational purposes need to be developed in the future.