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The Impact of Instructor Twitter Use on Course Performance Indicators: A Quasi-Experiment within Higher Education Communications Courses

The Impact of Instructor Twitter Use on Course Performance Indicators: A Quasi-Experiment within Higher Education Communications Courses

Eric M. Fife (James Madison University, USA), C Leigh Nelson (James Madison University, USA), and Theresa B. Clarke (James Madison University, USA)
Copyright: © 2023 |Pages: 15
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-6684-7123-4.ch087
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Abstract

An exploratory quasi-experiment of college-level students was used to examine the difference in a variety of course indicators among instructors when they did not use Twitter as a supplement to their courses, when they moderately used Twitter, and when they used Twitter a great deal in their courses. When instructors used Twitter in their classes, perceived learning via technological mediums, perceived classroom community with regard to technological media, perceived pedagogical affect, perceived course effectiveness, perceived learning performance, and perceived perception of learning from Twitter were all greater than when they did not use Twitter in their courses. Overall results of this study recommend further research and a continued focus on the usage of Twitter in the higher education classroom.
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Twitter

In the past, Twitter (2013) described itself as “a real-time information network that connects users to the latest stories, ideas, opinions and news about what you find interesting.” Now, Twitter (2017) is “what’s happening in the world and what people are talking about right now.” Despite the slight shift in emphasis, the fundamental Twitter platform has remained virtually unchanged since its inception. The first short message from a user, or “tweet,” was sent in 2006 (blog.twitter.com, 2011). In its twelfth year of operation, there are now over 328 million active users of Twitter, including 68 million in the United States (Fiegerman, 2017). Though Twitter user growth is currently somewhat stagnant (Fiegerman, 2017) as other social networking sites, notably Instagram, have exploded in popularity (Constine, 2017), Twitter still occupies a unique and important place in the social media landscape and remains of great interest to scholars. According to Kim and Kim (2016), a recent Google Scholar search for articles including the word “Twitter” in the title yielded approximately 1,150,000 papers. Twitter may be used both by individuals and organizations, none of whom pay a fee or face a limit on the number of “tweets” they can produce per day. Twitter effectively occupies two categories of internet sites researched by scholars, qualifying both as a weblog (specifically, microblogging) site and as an SNS.

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