Who: Alessandro Cesarano, Doctoral Student
Where: University of South Florida, Second Language Acquisition and Instructional Technologies Program
What: Using Facebook as Course Management System
Why: Cesarano uses Facebook as a course management system instead of the University sponsored Blackboard system, because of better software options and offerings and students’ knowledge of Facebook when starting the course.
How: Facebook is used to send out homework assignments and to connect with students. Cesarano encourages students to create a Facebook account for academic purposes, separate from their personal account. This way there is a lower level of distraction in the classroom (not having personal updates on the profile while in class) and also privacy concerns are minimized if using a separate account. The class using Facebook is a beginning Spanish class and Cesarano cites having more access to authentic cultural material on Facebook on of the reasons he uses the system for course management. Facebook is a system that students (for the most part) already know how to use, so Cesarano enjoys being able to avoid using class time to teach students how to use a new program (like Blackboard).
While using Facebook in the classroom, Cesarano has seen added collaboration, communication, and increase student engagement outside of the classroom. The class’ Facebook group is programmed completely in Spanish, so students read and comment on posted material completely submerged in the language. As a “best practice” idea, students were given a user agreement at the beginning of the course outlining guidelines for using the Facebook page in the classroom. The guidelines state that students can only accept those in the student’s specific class as friends and students cannot promote or share inappropriate content in any way.
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