The Use of Social Media Services at Scottish Universities

Frank Rennie

doi:10.14297/jpaap.v4i1.167

Abstract

The opportunities for Scottish universities to engage with their staff, students and the general public using social media services is examined. The presence of public-facing social media links on university homepages was noted to be common to all institutions. Although the specific social media services identified varied considerably, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were the most prevalent. Using a web-based survey, policies, practices and attitudes towards the use of social media in education by staff and students were explored. The results indicate that while the use of social media by Scottish universities is widespread, there is no consensus on who can use these services or for what purpose these services are encouraged. Neither are there clear official guidelines on the use of social media services for engaging with education and research. All the universities were consistent in their use of third-party social media services rather than using internal, bespoke applications. This paper documents a baseline for the emerging use of social media by universities and notes that the current situation is embryonic, inconsistent, and at times contradictory. A longitudinal study is recommended.

Highlights

The growth of the use of social media in Higher Education (Rennie, 2014; Conole & Alevizou, 2010) is a noticeable factor in contemporary communications, but as many/most of these services have originally been created for diverse purposes other than for education, there are frequently a number of contested issues with their adoption for formal education (Hemmi, Bayne & Land, 2009)
There have been a number of studies that attempt to assess the level of use and impact of various social media services in higher education, including the use of Facebook (Barden, 2014; Junco, 2012; Roblyer, McDaniel, Webb, Herman, & Witty, 2010), Twitter (Lewis & Rush, 2013; Junco, Heibergert, & Loken, 2011; Dunlap & Lowenthal, 2009), Flickr (Chu & Van Dusen, 2008; Campbell, 2007; Lerman & Jones, 2006) and YouTube (Tan, 2013; Tan & Pearce, 2011; Sharoff, 2011)
This paper looks at trying to establish a baseline of knowledge about how the nineteen Scottish universities and Higher Educational Institutes deal with the incorporation of social media services into their corporate business of education and research

Summary

Introduction

The growth of the use of social media in Higher Education (Rennie, 2014; Conole & Alevizou, 2010) is a noticeable factor in contemporary communications, but as many/most of these services have originally been created for diverse purposes other than for education, there are frequently a number of contested issues with their adoption for formal education (Hemmi, Bayne & Land, 2009). There have been some well-articulated discussions on the acceptability, validity, even the desirability of academic publishing via social media, in contrast to traditional journals, and how this should influence academic tenure and promotion (Weller, 2011). This is a wide-ranging set of issues which cannot all be resolved here, it is realised that the newness of web 2.0 social media interaction means that there is not even a common understanding of attitudes towards the use of social media at the university level of study. This paper looks at trying to establish a baseline of knowledge about how the nineteen Scottish universities and Higher Educational Institutes deal with the incorporation of social media services into their corporate business of education and research

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion