We cannot deny how social media has become a part of our daily lives, how it has influenced us and how it has connected us to the rest of the world. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google Plus are among the social media platforms that almost everyone accesses today. Aside from providing a means to peek into other people’s lives, communicate without borders, and serve as entertainment, we cannot take away the value social media provides in e-Learning.
Educators, companies, and organizations rely on social media to assist in providing learning, share best practices, promote educational materials together or within the training modules and individual programs. Acquiring knowledge has now become learner-centric which should have always been the case.
Social media platforms provide informal learning. For someone who’d like to learn how to bake a cake, for example, you can search YouTube and choose from varied lessons on how to make a delicious cake. If you’re interested to know about something you came across, look it up in Google Plus. Anything that piques your interest is available online. You can do research and learn from millions of articles available.
Social media is widely used as supplemental material for training purposes. Combining the use of social media in training as visual aids, for exercises, and to keep discussions and classes more interactive has been successful and is widely accepted. The scope and reach of E-learning through social media is vast and is now easily accessible to most. An instructor can record the tutorials and broadcast it or come up with teasers for offered courses to generate interest with possible students. Advertisements through posts, tweets, and invites can use to gain more audiences. Creating a Facebook group with the learners also helps to keep everyone in the class informed of when and how the next training class will be held.
You could start a blog about e-learning and the latest trends can also be shared on the blog, which becomes supplemental learning tools for learners. A blog can also be used by teachers to make learning more interactive. Students can create blogs where they post assignments instead of submitting it in hard copies. They can put in book reviews, history research, and any topic assigned to be submitted. Since this can be viewed by anyone in the class, it also helps further discussions and promotes a healthy competitive spirit among students. You can update the blogs and include new links such as eLearning articles, videos and online presentations that can be useful for the students.
Using social media in E-Learning also saves time and is very efficient. At this day an age, faster delivery is usually the direction and the need. E-learning using social media reduces learning time by from 25 to 60 percent versus traditional learning. It doesn’t take long to start and wrap up sessions or classes. Learners can set their own pace instead of trying to keep up with the group. Since classes are held online, it saves you the time to get to commute or drive to classes, trainings, and seminars. Learners have the option to just focus on specific topics or modules of a course or program that they need to learn and skip those that they already know. Also, with E-Learning using social media, there is no limit to the number of classrooms or attendees compared to regular classes where seats and actual capacity should be taken into consideration.
YouTube has become a popular tool used in E-Learning. E-Learning professionals use YouTube to make E-Learning courses. You can create webinars that learners can use even after it has ended. This serves as reference tools for those who want to take a refresher on the topic discussed in preparation for an exam. The videos can also draw in new audiences since they would get a chance to have a look at what your class or topics are. YouTube is useful in delivering videos which are better received by learners, especially for complex subjects or processes. By putting up an actual demonstration, it would be easier for the learners to grasp the concept as it is fully shown step by walking them through. This helps learners to retain what they’ve learned and given a visual context of you E-Learning content.
Twitter is an effective tool to get feedback from. Consolidate Twitter feeds and share this with the learners. This gives them a chance to share their thoughts and views on the topics discussed with the group. As a teacher or instructor, collating tweets and sorting through them would give you an insight of how your class was received. You can almost instantly find out any positive feedback or negative ones that you can improve on for the next course and presentation.
Author bio:
Vincent Hill is an expert writer who writes on different categories like how to start a blog, content writing, blog design and much more. His writing is not only descriptive but also meaningful. He loves to share his ideas on different categories.
