Apostolos K.Anyone here in academic program admin? What do you use to share documents/info with your students and alums and to foster community outside of course spaces? Considering dropping our current platform after 14 years of use and migrating, looking for options🤔
Virginia Yonkers@harmonygritz @koutropoulos I have 4 different Unis in which I'm a alumni. My International MBA uses multiple platforms but in the end reverted to email, twitter, and linked in to keep in contact. My PhD allows alumni to maintain their university email, but they need to sign up through the alumni office. They also are pretty active on Linked in, twitter, and facebook (the uni had university facebook for our campus before it went public).
George Station@Comprof1 @koutropoulos After skimming back through this thread, bottom line seems to be that students socially network in their own way, and it's not the institution's way for most. Is it because they're not in on the design?
(For my own campus, I can place the folks by name & face in the meeting deciding what edtech to deploy. Not a student or alum in sight, except the IT folks who got their degree from us.)
@harmonygritz @Comprof1 I don't often see students or alums in those discussions either. I know that from my cohort's views at Athabasca, even though The Landing was a SSO with the rest of the stuff that we used, it was a bit out of our way to socialize, whereas people seemed to have Fb open all the time so they'd post in our cohort's private group
@harmonygritz @Comprof1 We also used the private Fb group as a class backchannel every week when we had our 3-hour evening sessions on Adobe Connect. I think we felt more "free" in that space to express ourselves than something that was institutionally owned.
@koutropoulos @Comprof1 When FB environment is seen as more open than your institution's environment... Well I already shared a cartoon w/ you on Twitter to sum that up.
@harmonygritz @Comprof1 I think a big component is summed up by "going to people, not waiting for them to come to you" but the key is knowing when you're invited/welcomed to join rather than just showing up.
@koutropoulos @Comprof1 I can specifically point to what killed my participation on the campus in-house blog/social area. It was someone senior chiming in, telling me not to worry my pretty little head about an issue they supposedly had under control. They never did tell us what was being done, just made it clear that we didn't need to be discussing it on the totally in-house blog.
@harmonygritz @Comprof1 sounds kind of what killed/silenced a grassroots IT pros network on campus. A previous CIO wanted all IT under their roof, and did not seemed thrilled about "shadow IT" on campus