Facebook Groups as an Academic Teaching Aid: Case Study and Recommendations for Educators

Introduction The use of social networks in teaching is not only a matter of convenience. In the introduction to his famous article Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Marc Prensky (2001) noted that "Our students have changed radically. Today's students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach" (bold typeface in the original). Furthermore, he stated that "because the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language. " Four years later Prensky (2005) suggested that "Students want and deserve to receive this content through 21st century tools that are powerful, programmable, and customizable--through tools that belong to them. We could offer this content to them on their cell phones, for example. " Integrating networking technology into classes can be done in many ways, on the continuum of no technology at all at one end, to fully-online courses on the other end. In between there are various options to conduct a blended learning course (Garrison & Kanuka, 2004; Graham, 2006; Valiathan, 2002). Most of the implementations of technology enhanced learning (TEL) use a walled garden solutions, mainly a LMS systems (Alier, Casan, & Piguillem, 2010; Bhattacharya & Dron, 2007). Those systems protect the learners from outer content, supply the adequate intimacy needed for social presence (Noy, Raban & Ravid, 2006) and provide a sense of a learning group that works together in the learning process. At the same time, walled garden solutions force the learners to move from the platforms which they use for their daily computerized activities to the propriety systems. Recently, educators started replacing LMS systems with open systems. Open systems have many advantages and can be integrated easily with the learner regular activities and make him learn all the time. While open systems have many advantages, we are still forced to solve some challenges, for example how to supply the group sense to each learner. In the early days of using Internet technology in classes, educators complained that they need to maintain the course site and answer to student's e-mail 24/7. We hope that the use of open systems, like Facebook, for learning will enhance their use outside regular teaching hours and extend the class to the external environment. Facebook (FB) is one of the "21st century tools" that are the playground of the digital natives and can be used for teaching purposes. By August 2013 the total number of Facebook (FB) users has reached 1.5 billion! (Smith, 2013). The percentage of Facebook users in the age group of 18-29 (the age of most students) approaches 90% (Brenner & Smith, 2013). This means that a very high percentage of university and college students are very familiar with Facebook. Furthermore, they login to Facebook a few times daily and a large fraction of them practically "live" with Facebook. The familiarity of the Facebook platform and its very frequent use by students makes it an appealing candidate for various learning enhancing applications, in parallel, or instead of other university platforms such as "High Learn" (the Israeli version of Fox system by Britannica), Blackboard, Moodle or others. However, being a social network site, Facebook is open by design. This open nature of Facebook prevented its use in classes since it could not provide adequate intimacy. The Introduction of Facebook closed and secret groups at 2010 enabled the creation of closed, course-specific communities, where only the lecturer, instructor and students constitute the group members. These self-contained communities can be used for asynchronous and synchronous interactions in an academic course. The use of Facebook groups also allows sharing of information, documents, pictures, links to websites, etc. The open nature of the Facebook group (to its members only) provides a convenient platform for cooperative and/or collaborative learning. …