perspective. In reviewing each team’s four week wiki activity, postings ranged from 51 to 34, with a mean of 42 posts between the four social media platform pages. These numbers included all posts, team-based and individual contributions to other teams, with each post varying from substantive content (multiple paragraphs) to edits made on others’ posts. The wiki served as a “virtual research paper” that students pulled from to create and teach each other through their oral presentations, addressing the first goal Students’ responses to a post class survey with this open-ended question, “What did you like best about this wiki assignment?”, yielded consistent comments and shows the second goal was met: Sharing/collaboration to gather info in teams (n=11); learning something new about social media platforms (n=4); and good learning for future jobs (n=1). Interestingly, the biggest benefit students identified, team collaboration, is also a key wiki benefit identified pedagogically (Lamb & Johnson, 2007, 2009). The third goal was accomplished as teams presented to each other a tremendous amount of knowledge, insights and recommendations flowed forth as each team leveraged their knowledge to advise each other after presenting their client findings. In fact, several students afterwards thanked other teams and how helpful these peers had been in helping them make better recommendations to their clients. Given this experience and learning outcomes attained, it appears empowering students to teach each other social media platforms in an IMC class works well. Enabling students to learn by teaching is a new way to overcome the challenge of social media currency and, as evidenced by student feedback, they not only learned but also enjoyed being recognized by peers as an “expert” in one social media platform. Additionally, two of the 14 seniors who graduated in May reported landing their entry-level jobs as social media specialist was reliant on this classroom learning experience.
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