Professors Meet Students on Twitter
Department of Teaching and Learning’s Clinical Assistant Professor Dr. Josh Diem using Twitter in his lecture on advertising’s influence on children.
Stand in the back of any university lecture hall and look at what the students are browsing over. Most professors would be astonished that it isn’t the pythagorean theorem. More often than not, students are on Facebook, Twitter or chatting with their friends. As social media marketers, and strong advocates for leveraging new tools, we saw an opportunity and challenge for professors to meet students in Twitter, the medium in which students had once used to better ignore their professors.
We took our social media communication skills to the classrooms of the University of Miami to help professors correspond with a large group of students without disrupting the lecture.
By using Twitter’s hashtags, professors set up a real-time message board for students to propose questions, talking points and arguments. Professors or Teaching Assistants (TAs) monitored responses and addressed those they felt appropriate.
“Twitter is meant to enhance communication, so we’re enhancing communication,” said Nick Santillo, 24, University of Miami alumnus and owner here at Voltier. “Even in staff meetings, training sessions, and the boardroom – Twitter is constructive when used this way.”
The study was inspired by this video created at the University of Texas, Dallas:
University of Miami Assistant Clinical Professor Dr. Josh Diem, Department of Teaching and Learning, uses mid-semester evaluations to see what his students think of his class. Using Twitter, he can get those updates daily.
“If people aren’t resistant to change,” said Dr. Diem. “[Twitter] offers a good tool to find out what needs to be changed.“
Tweets to the Staff
Just like the classroom, the likelihood of your employees absorbing everything in your staff meeting, training sessions, or even boardroom is pretty small. Not only will this enhance participation, employees will walk away with a makeshift outline of your meeting.
We wrote a how-to guide that’s going out to business owners and universities all over. “People always talk about all the useful benefits of Twitter,” said Santillo, who manages several client’s Twitter accounts, “but you never really see a practical use. This is just one we’ve found.”
Keep in mind: your Tweets are public. We don’t recommend trying to cram your competitive strategy into that 140 character box. You cannot interact in a hashtag conversation without having public Tweets, so be sure to uncheck Protect my Tweets in on the settings page.
