The Fifty Percent Rule: The Challenge of Engaging Students in Social Media in the Classroom

Abstract

This paper describes the use of three separate community-sharing tools in the classroom over time to teach a marketing technology class at a large Midwestern University and a class blogging project over three semesters at a small Eastern College. These methods include a class wiki, a private Ning social network and the public Google+ social network. The paper describes the features of each and evaluates the pros and cons through their application for the learner-centered teaching approach. The research measures and reports the results of these efforts, discusses the challenges of engaging students in social media and online communities, explores underlying rationales and suggests opportunities for improvement. Rather than suggest widespread use of social media in the classroom, these results indicate that engagement might not be 100% and that social media should, of course, be supplemented with other forms of engagement.