Can social media aid higher educational institutes in India for improving student involvement?"

Off late there has been enough buzz around "social learning" and it’s potential to bring about a paradigm shift in the way students learn. Since, I personally believe in power social media weilds on the way students learn, I decided to give my take on this. Rather than delve upon the topic in general – as its been beaten to death, I am looking at a series of blog posts where I want to highlight the role technology/ social media plays in higher education in India. In this blog, I am looking to set stage and invite the views of the readers on this subject

For the uninitiated, I would like to share some quick facts about FB and its growth in India . The numbers are mind blowing.

Clearly, what this suggests is that today students in India are going and spending time on a platform and they are comfortable using it. The question we need to ask is "Can we use some of that time to drive student learning??"

Before we try and answer that, I would like to raise some key issues that I believe need to be addressed for adoption of any new technology in higher education, including things like "social learning".

What drives students?

One of the key things I keep hearing in Indian context is "Students are not interested to learn". However, I strongly believe that if the students are engaged and motivated in the right manner than a vast majority of them can be converted from non-learners to learners, and technology can play a vital role here. At the same time, technology/learning platform can only be an aid for the faculty, and its benefits to students will remain limited without the support and facilitation from the faculty.

What faculty wants?

Often, I have found that faculty is interested in adopting new technologies, but they do not want to spend a lot of time in learning the platform. They also have a lot of administrative and non-academic tasks at hand and consequently if any new technology demands a lot of their time, in all probability it will not fly. "Teacher training" has been cited as one of the key requirements for adoption of any new technology in Indian colleges, but again, it has its limitations.

So, for all the technology/platform providers, there are some questions that we need to ask ourselves:

"What are the technologies/platforms that we can drive student engagement and learning?"

"How can the faculty deliver more without spending a lot of extra time to understand the technology?"

The first question is reasonably talked about, but I feel that the second is particularly important because the faster the faculty can adopt to a platform, the more they can deliver to the students.

This leads us to ask the question -- "Is social networking the answer??" Part 2 of my blog hopes to address this…