Abstract
With the new wave of young-minded, digitally-fluent, and tech-tethered instructors comes new creative e-pathways that build up novel e-pedagogies. More than ever before, innovative e-teaching modalities are needed to navigate the intricate socially-networked abyss where students and teachers alike have chosen to function in this pandemic period. That is why frameworks, however nascent they might be, are required to steer the learning ship, on more than one social media platform, to meet specific educational ends. In this light, this chapter presents a descriptive unobtrusive study which was conducted to map out an innovative e-mode of grammar instruction of a secondary e-tutor who was able to tutor a massive number of e-tutees simultaneously on Instagram and YouTube in the first phase, adding on, subsequently, Facebook to the e-instructional process. The findings unveil a framework of how to leverage or educationalize certain features of these cloud-based outlets concurrently and reach a more optimized e-method of multi-platform tutoring.
TopIntroduction
Searching for and generating content, seeking and maintaining contact, and navigating a vast digital networking landscape are basic contemporary components of the social media literacy that 21st-century teachers and students, as residents of the digital world, possess, particularly young adults and adults. As of April 2021, inferences made from statistical studies indicate that the global number of social media users “equates to more than 70 percent of the eligible global population” (DataReportal, 2021), thereby, eliminating the non-eligible generation of people under the age of 13. It was estimated that the average user virtually exist through profiles on more than eight social media platforms (Omnicore, 2021).
In a more localized fashion, Algerian social media demographics amount to 56.5% of the total population (44.23 million citizens) as of January 2021 (DataReportal, 2021). Statistics further show that users’ preferences of platforms differ from one country to another. Such distinctions in use can also be attributed to “cultural variations” (Selwyn, 2012, p. 1). In Algeria, it is commonly safe for an individual to assume that others own an account or accounts on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snap Chat, LinkedIn, and YouTube. It is both the state of such context and most parts of the world that participation in social media has, in Bullinger and Vie’s (2015) words “permeated our collective culture” and is now considered “necessary” and “expected”. Social media nowadays represent the default online space for distance communication. A reality that is only cementing itself further as this technology continues to evolve.
Unlike other technologies such as learning management systems (LMSs), which are at their core one-dimensional and solely education-oriented, social media are inherently designed for a wider range of social interaction activities. And as students and teachers constitute a large part of social media users, it was inevitable for social media platforms, as a rapidly developing and highly immersive technology, to become, in many cases, the preferred and prioritized medium of communication for the educational community worldwide. Social media offers teachers and students immense potentialities in this respect as it is rich with technical features that can be capitalized on and mined for creative educational fulfillment. Examples of the latter can manifest in the form of a formal task such as a course delivery or a non-formal one such as project collaboration among students.
However, due to their social-based design and multi-dimensional nature, teachers and learners alike may find it challenging to proceed pedagogicaly on these applications. Such educational activities may not be grounded on frameworks to aid in structuring social media enabled teaching and learning. To this end, the current scholarship should attend to a nuanced exploration of individual features of social media and an explicit articulation of how social networking platforms' functions can be educationalized.
Key Terms in this Chapter
User-Driven Education: The process of incorporating traditional student-centred pedagogical principles while utilizing the new media for teaching and learning activities. User-driven practices internally carries the implications of what it means to shift education to technology-mediated spaces where students as users are automatically given active-participation affordances.
Transferring Openness: It refers to the potential ability to transfer the socially-enabled platform feature of amassing an exponential number of subscribers that can go as far as, for the time being, more than 2.7 active billion users (Most Popular Social Media Platforms in 2021, 2021), to other educational-based platforms.
Multi-Platform E-Tutoring: The ability to tutor the same e-content in different platforms either simultaneously, by cross-posting and cross-sharing via interlinked social-mediated platforms like Instagram and Facebook, or not.
Interactive Media: It describes the set of digital outlets which are part of Web 2.0. They allow users to actively engage with content and with other users using a range of different features.
Online Exposure: It is related to fact that the e-instructor’s way of teaching, when operating in an open virtual class, can be scrutinized, from all perceivable angles, by anyone who has access to it and resultantly may generate both positive and negative feedback.
Decolonization of Knowledge: The act of freeing knowledge possession from monopolizing entities, be they individuals or institutions or organizations, to all everyone regardless of their socio-economic background.
E-Tutoring Extension: The act of extending the tutoring learning experience from a particular social arena to another one whilst adapting this last according to the new target social media-oriented features as each one has its own way of operating.