Use of Facebook for Enhancing Student Engagement in a Higher Education Blended Engineering Course

In spite of the fact that many universities include blended learning in offering their programmes, student engagement in courses remains a challenge. This research started off as an investigation into the use of the Learning Management System (LMS) by students of an engineering course and into ways to improve student engagement. The heavy usage of social media by the students prompted us to find how Facebook could be used in a course in conjunction with an LMS. A closed Facebook group was created by the lecturer and used to interact with the class. Data collection was done through an online survey of the students at the end of the class. A social media analytics software was also used to analyse the interactions on the Facebook group. A journal was also kept for the lecturer’s thoughts throughout the class. To avoid bias, the second author, an educational technologist whose conference paper on Social Media inspired this one, was involved in the analysis and interpretation of the data.The results were very encouraging. A majority of students were actively engaged by the Facebook group. However, this research put into perspective a series of potential issues with the use of Facebook or any other social media in higher education which would warrant further research.