I'm well into my interviews - I have now interviewed five students about their use of my system and other social networks. I'm getting an interesting range of perspectives from students about how they use these tools and what they'd like to see from them.
Firstly, it's now very clear to me that the student body I'm studying is heavily invested in Facebook. All participants use Facebook for their studies, and no other social network. A couple had a presence on Academia.edu and ResearchGate, but there was no Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, or other social networks in use, particularly not for their studies. Facebook has a clear first-mover advantage over any system I develop: the students all have Facebook accounts before they come to this degree, so it's natural to them to set up Facebook study groups. They are setting up whole-of-year and tutorial group Facebook groups, but also study groups of varying sizes and success rates. One very active study group has 260 members - nearly the whole cohort. From the way these groups are entrenched in the students' study lives, it would be very difficult to switch students over to a new system - they would need to be steered to use the new system from the beginning of first year, probably by academics warning them of the dangers of Facebook. But their patterns of Facebook usage have also indicated to me some features that are missing from the system as it stands - particularly, the ability to post to groups, rather than to the whole cohort. Interestingly, that facility was in my original design plan, but I abandoned it after deciding that I needed to maximize the exposure of each item to students in order to increase cross-cohort collaboration.
The students also had some interesting ideas about changes that would improve the system. A common thread was the request for more flexibility in their self-presentation on the profile pages. Currently, the pages allow them to present a small amount of information about their interests and previous degrees, but suggestions for additions (particularly from one participant) included travel plans, favourite books, medical specialty and placement interests. They would like to be able to better present themselves as professionals. Another common thread was that it would be useful to have less rigidity in how the resources were attached to the curriculum: rather than exclusively binding the resources to learning objectives, it would be useful to bind to other levels of the curriculum; and to search and be able to tag the resources.
The students have generally agreed that an embedded system made sense, and would be preferable to Facebook if done right, but generally pointed out that it would be difficult to do. It wasn't clear to me whether they were sincere or were just trying not to hurt my feelings - as they all knew I was the architect of the system and had a vested interest in it succeeding. But they did understand the reasoning behind linking to the curriculum, as well as having a protected space. The issue of copyright was one that several noted - they mentioned that one frequently shared item on Facebook is textbooks, and that they wouldn't be comfortable sharing those in a University controlled space.
Most students had a reasonable amount of awareness of the available functionality. But when discussing it, a few things stood out. Many didn't realize that the rating tools existed - that they could collaboratively curate the resources uploaded by their peers. And none of them were aware that staff can't see the shared resources. I had announced this early on, and I'm fairly sure that I repeated my announcement, but none of them were aware. This wasn't one of my scripted interview questions - I found out when students stated that one reason for their wariness of these tools was that staff could see what they were doing.
Lastly, I realized very quickly that after these interviews I would need to prepare some feedback to the Faculty about the students' experiences in the degree. One student stated that one of the reasons she was so keen to participate in the interviews was that it would give her a way to feedback to the University (side note here: I am also a staff member, though not in the Faculty I am studying). It seems to me that it would be an ethical breach not to give this feedback to the Faculty, so in the later interviews I have informed students that I would be collating the feedback that is relevant to the teaching of the program, and giving that to the Faculty. Quite a bit of it is relevant to my project - particularly the students' descriptions of the way assessment drives their learning behaviour, and how it limits their interest in sharing, but also in reading outside the scope of what will be assessed. It's clear that a culture has been developed within the student body, driven inadvertently by the Faculty, of learning only what will be on the exam, rather than developing a deep and broad understanding of Medicine and how it fits into our world.
These have been very informative interviews; I'm planning to interview two or three more students, but I already have a collection of things I can act on, and with luck be able to deliver to students before next year's intake starts their studies.
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