Using Twitter in Higher Education: What are Students' Initial Perceptions and Experiences?

Of the range of recent technological developments, social media have become the most widely adopted by the current generation of students (Evans 2014). Next to this, the digiMeter (iMinds 2015), which reports on a yearly base the ownership and effective use of (social) media among the Flemish population, revealed that the number of people with an account on a social media site is still increasing. However, despite the widespread use and the potential of social media to enhance teaching and learning in higher education, research on students' perceptions, actual use, and the effectiveness of Twitter as a learning and teaching tool is still lacking. The purpose of the current study was to determine higher education students' expectations and experiences about the use of the microblogging and social networking platform Twitter for educational purposes. For this reason, an intervention in the course Instructional Strategies taught at the Faculty of Educational Sciences at Ghent University was set up. Students initial status of Twitter use and expectations and their changed experiences throughout the course were measured by means of three measurements, the pre-, mid-semester-, and post-test survey. Next to quantitative data obtained through the three surveys, qualitative data has been collected by organizing four focus groups to get a deeper insight into students' motivations, their experiences and their suggestions for future practice. Our results indicate that before the intervention, students had rather high expectations about Twitter in higher education. They believed, for example, that Twitter is a tool to get insight into teachers' and peers' opinions, to close the gap between formal and informal learning, and to keep informed about education-related topics. When asking to students' experiences after the intervention, we however found a moderate preference for the use of Twitter in higher education. We can conclude that as in previous research (e.g. Kvavik 2005; Raes & Schellens 2011), this study supports the idea of throwing doubt upon the myth of "digital natives".