Student Evaluations of Social Media in a University Course

Although university students use social media such as blogs, Twitter, instant messaging, text messaging, and Facebook to communicate with each other, the number of these tools used in the context of their coursework is more limited. In this qualitative study we investigate student evaluations of the use of social media in a university course. Students in an upper level university class that employed social media were asked to reflect on their use of social media in the class. Most report that they found the tools useful, either for their personal productivity or as training tools. We draw implications for the use of social media in university instruction from these findings.