Use of Twitter to encourage interaction in a multi-campus pharmacy management course

Abstract

Objective: To implement and assess the effectiveness of using Twitter to encourage interaction between faculty members, guests, and students in a pharmacy management course taught simultaneously on 2 campuses.

Design: Students were required to tweet a minimum of 10 times over several class sessions. The course instructor and guest professionals also participated.

Assessment: More than eighteen hundred tweets were made by students, guests, and the instructor. Students tweeted most frequently with each other and found value in reading each others' tweets. One hundred thirty-one students completed an optional evaluation survey. Seventy-one percent indicated that Twitter was distracting, 69% believed it prevented note taking, and more than 80% indicated that it facilitated class participation and allowed an opportunity to voice opinions.

Conclusion: Educators who wish to use Twitter in pharmacy courses must balance the potentially positive aspects of the technology, such as increased interaction among students, with potentially negative aspects, such as the interruptive nature of Twitter use and the large volume of tweets generated by a class assignment.

Keywords: Twitter; class participation; interaction; social networking.

Figure 1.

Tweets by day and user.

Figure 2.

Student tweets by type.

Figure 3.

Guest (days 1, 3 and 5) and instructor (day 6) tweets by type.