Educational Implications of a Social Networking Application, Twitter™, for Anatomical Sciences

Social networking applications have become a ubiquitous part of daily life, especially for the current generation of students. Use of the social networking application, Twitter™, for education is explored in the current study. During a year-long, integrated basic science course, the instructors tweeted a multiple-choice question relating to course content after each lecture, followed by another tweet with the correct answer the following day. A Twitter™ link was made available to first- and second-year dental students with an option to sign up for “push” notifications on their smartphones. The second-year students were invited to take a pre-quiz before the Twitter™ feeds started and then a post-quiz 10 weeks later to attempt to quantify the educational value of the tweets. Further, students were invited to take a survey to measure their perception of the overall value of Twitter™ as an educational tool and to obtain their opinion on the usability of a social networking application for educational purposes. Results indicate that (1) students were not familiar with Twitter™ and voiced their desire for anatomy feeds through Facebook™ initially, (2) many students did not have Twitter™ accounts and had to create one, (3) second-year students preferred to have tweets “pushed” to their phones while most of the first-year students preferred to visit the Twitter™ site before course assessments, (4) most students found the Twitter™ feeds to be a good educational resource and planned to continue following the feeds, and (5) Twitter™ feeds complemented the second-year students’ ability to recall course material. © 2014, International Association of Medical Science Educators.