Antonio Calderon – @acalderon_pe
Lourdes Merono – @Lourdes_Mer_Gar
UCAM Catholic University of Murcia (Spain)
Positive teacher-student relationships are at the heart of both teachers’ and students’ successful development in an educational context (Raufelder, Nitsche, Breitmeyer, Kebler, Herrmann, & Regner, 2016). However, the daily school routine often lacks opportunities for students and teachers to make meaningful interpersonal exchanges and thereby address their being dimension (Böhnisch, 1996; Raufelder, 2007). In the college context, reality is not much different. Currently lecturers are experiencing with different uses of social media and digital technology to develop a positive relationship with undergraduate students to set the basis of a meaningful learning experience (Jenkins, Browne, Walker, & Hewitt, 2001) since it is expected a 2,44 billions of active social media users worldwide by 2018 (Statista, 2015).
The mobile phone app WhatsApp is one of the most worldwide used. From April 2013 to February 2016 there has been a growth from 200 to 1000 million of active users. In Spain, by 2014 was the leading app ahead of Skype, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, or Snapchat (Statista, 2014). The challenge in this new context is to find a pedagogical way to integrate these apps to enrich the teacher-student relationship that stimulate the learning process of undergraduate students
Two intact classes (n=110) of first year undergraduates and one lecturer participated. The students are from the iGeneration (most commonly defined with birth years between the mid-1990s, and early 2000s). WhatsApp was the selected app. It is a cross-platform, encrypted, instant messaging client for smartphones that uses the Internet to send text messages, documents, images, video, user location and audio messages to other users (individual or groups) using standard cellular mobile numbers.
In this study it was used a WhatsApp class-group that includes all students who agreed to belong. The instructional setting included: (1) pre-lecture communication (with an image that generates curiosity, ten minutes before the lecture starts; (2) communication in-lecture (to share the video link of the week); and (3) after-lecture communication (with attractive slides or conclusion statements and affective feedback) It was sent two or three minutes after lecture). The class-group had others rules refer to: (1) maximum respect for all the opinions; (2) correct writing and spelling; (3) no communications in late hours, and (4) share content related to the subject. The non-lecture days, communications are much selected (to avoid overload) and included: (1) links to tweets, and learning resources; (2) class reminders (i.e., do not forget to bring your laptop tomorrow morning’; (3) tips to reinforcement learning (with images and thought provoking ideas to foster reflection). The class-group action most positively assessed by the students was performed every Wednesday from 10 to 11pm and it was called the ‘Happy Hour’. This was an hour of informal learning for questions around the course, weekly assignments, etc. This study followed a qualitative method approach and was framed around the perspective of the lecturer. The lecturer online blog was analyzed with QSR NVivo program 11.
The goal was to examine the lecturer perception about the effect of the WhatsApp class-group and the student-teacher relationship. Following the recommendations Bardin (2002), a coding system was made after a first superficial reading (exploratory) to create categories and indicators through inductive reasoning. The WhatsApp class-group creates a ‘full connection’ and an optimal ‘emotional engagement’ between the teacher and the students. It stimulates a gorgeous student involvement and a closer teacher-student relationship that improved the learning experience of the first year undergraduate degree students.
References:
Bardin, L. (2002). Análisis de contenido. Madrid: Ediciones Akal.
Böhnisch, L. (1996). Pädagogische Soziologie. Eine Einführung, München.
Jenkins, M., Browne, T., Walker, R., & Hewitt, R. (2011). The development of technology enhanced learning: Findings from a 2008 survey of UK higher education institutions. Interactive Learning Environments, 19(5), 447-465. doi: 10.1080/10494820903484429
Raufelder, D. (2007). Von Machtspielen zu Sympathiegesten. Marburg: Tectum.
Raufelder, D., Nitsche, L., Breitmeyer, S., Keßler, S., Herrmann, E., & Regner, N. (2016). Students’ perception of “good” and “bad” teachers – Results of a qualitative thematic analysis with German adolescents. International Journal of Educational Research, 75, 31-44. doi: 10.1016/j.ljer.2015.11004
Statista. (2014). Leading social networks worldwide as of January 2014, ranked by number of active users. Retrieved from http://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/
Statista. (2015). Statistics and facts about Social Networks. Retrieved from http://www.statista.com/topics/1164/social-networks/