Using Social Media to Enhance ELearning

Whoah?... We can use social media to enhance elearning?!

Yep. We can, and here's why:

• Social Media can create a more collaborative experience for students
• Social Media can help make content more engaging
• Social Media can allow your company to reap massive benefits
  

Most of us know how to facebook, myspace, tweet, and so on, but how do we use these social media outlets to make our online courses better? Let’s take a look at how we can use social media to be the best we can be.

Social Media can create a more collaborative experience for students

Social media can create a more collaborative experience for students because most students have varied expectations about elearning. Social media helps you engage students and develop better presentations.

Media use is on the rise and Multi-tasking has increased. Employees seem to push their work roles outside of the workplace by means of quick communications. Today's students want to take control of their learning and access information through convenient forms of media, such as their mobile. Social Media can help here by providing quick exchanges of information through various media formats.

Students also prefer different types of media interactions. So the more media interaction types you offer, the more ways you have of interacting with students before, during, and after they have taken a course.

You can use social media to allocate information, feedback, and networking in order to get the info and stats that you need, and when you need them. Social media outlets also offer tools such as polls and quizzes that can help you improve course content and delivery.

Social Media can make content more engaging

More robust and engaging content, that incorporates stories or examples, will increase student satisfaction, result in more constructive course feedback, and will potentially result in more recommendations for you company.

By creating an account, like twitter or facebook, and building it up, you can become a marketing powerhouse. These social media tools allow for real time information sharing and short updates that link students and companies to your company and its courseware.

In using sites like YouTube or Blogger, you can share information that can make your company more visible. For example, you can develop a series of videos or blogs that show teasers of courseware or what your company has to offer. Post them out there on the World Wide Web. Make sure to link them back to your site so that you can collect feedback and potential new students. If people like what they see in these posts, they may even share them with colleagues and friends through integrated social media channels.

Put an occasional tweet out there on your corporate account or share a snippet of new courseware with your facebook or myspace fans. Continued and open conversations keeps the info flowing and instigates responses from followers and students.

Social Media can allow your company to reap massive benefits

Social Media allows potential students to discover what past students have said about particular courses, to preview new courses, chat with present students, and network with current or potential students.

By utilizing social media sites that potential students frequent, you'll increase your audience, which in turn will increase the number of potential students or clients you can obtain.

Social Media offers opportunities for your company to promote its courseware. Use social media marketing by gaining followers, like on twitter. Then market to those followers with a specialized recruitment initiative.

Use social media for your own surveys, and to find new surveys by others. Social sites are a great place to ask questions in order to get new and better data related to your market. Additionally, followers of your social media accounts can have the ability to promote your surveys and share industry info with you. This constructive feedback helps foster the building of better content.

Social Media helps you stay attuned to trends, competitors, and market developments. So now, get out there and become a social media superstar!

Reference: 2010 Quantum Leap Marketing, Inc. GoToTraining_QLM_Social Media_in_Learning.pdf