Improving blended learning outcomes through academic social media

Social media had played an increasingly crucial role in young lives. In this paper, the most popular mobile social media application in China - We Chat has been used to develop an academic social media platform in order to improve students' blended learning outcomes of a SPOC (Small Private Online Course). We divided our workflow into four major parts: ( a) pushing course updates directly to students; (b) reminding inactive learners during the self-paced tutorials learning phase; (c) promoting students to participate in discussion forum; (d) providing self-service inquiry for course progress and seating chart. Split-tests between two groups (each group has 219 on-campus students) were conducted in the Fall 2017 semester. We analyzed the behavior statistics and the long-term influence between the controlled group and the experimental group. The results showed that the social tool has a positive impact in the promotion of on-campus students' learning. Our work shows the value of leaving a door open for SPOC researchers, properly identifying participants who are at-risk and developing personalized recommending systems could help in the improving learning outcomes.