Integrating Qualitative Components in Quantitative Courses Using Facebook.

Introduction As of the time of this writing, Facebook is the one of the most popular websites in the United States, second only to Google (Alexa, 2014). Social networks have a large and growing audience among high-school and college-age Americans. A study conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2010 revealed that 73% of 12 to 17 year old Americans and 72% of young American adults are online (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010). Of American adults age 18 and over with online profiles, 73% use Facebook, 48% use Myspace, and 14% use LinkedIn, revealing that Facebook is the most preferred social network (Lenhart et al., 2010). Adoption of social networking is high among young adults in other parts of the world too, with the percentage of 18-29 year olds reporting social network use being 94% in Britain, 84% in Russia, 62% in Brazil and 61% in China (Pew Research Center, 2012). Higher education institutions are learning "that 'technology' rates higher than 'rigor' or 'reputation' in high-school focus groups" when selecting colleges (Bugeja, 2006). Given Facebook's growing audience among young adults worldwide and the increasing importance of technology, educators are beginning to explore the appropriateness of its use in higher education. While Facebook was designed for social purposes, it has the potential to be used for learning due to the ease with which information in various formats can be shared with a group of people. The Facebook news feed is immediately visible upon logging on and features a list of content updates from a users' friends and groups and pages they follow. Educational content that appears in the Facebook news feed has the opportunity to grab users' attention each time they visit the social media platform. For example, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) maintains a Facebook page where it posts links to recent blogs and journal articles from academics and practitioners in the INFORMS community, . A person who has liked the INFORMS page will see these links to new results in the field of Operations Research in his or her Facebook news feed. Another example is the Huffington Post, an Internet newspaper that maintains a Facebook page where it shares links to each day's news articles along with short highlights from or commentary for the articles . People who have liked Huffington Post will see these links in their news feed and can click through to the content most interesting to them, without needing to visit the Huffington Post website separately. A post on the Facebook blog even describes a mechanism for using Facebook to create a personalized news channel (Lucich, 2010). These examples motivate the subject of this paper--how Facebook was incorporated into a college course in transportation logistics. The objectives of this paper are to describe the use of Facebook in a transportation logistics course and to compare student perceptions of using Facebook for the stated course purposes to student perceptions of using more traditional learning management systems. When a Facebook group was created for the course, the instructor posted assignments, course notes, and links to relevant educational content on the web to the group. Then those links appeared in each student's news feed, alongside updates from their friends, each time they logged onto Facebook. The Facebook news feed brings customized information from various sources to the user in one place. Other services such as Feedly and Google News exist to bring personalized web content to online users. However, Facebook enables users to easily interact with content, posting their own thoughts and opinions on items that are shared. Additionally, Facebook brings this integrated content to a platform users are visiting already. It has been reported that more than 50% of college students go on Facebook every day (Wang, Woo, Quek, Yang, & Liu, 2011). …