Social media likely aren’t at the top of most professors’ lists of teaching tools. After all, it’s too easy to scoff at their superficiality, grumble at their dearth of skilled writing and generally file their existence under recreational fluff.

But one professor at the USF College of Public Health believes that would be missing their powerful potential, so he’s sparked a COPH Twitter revolution that is quickly gaining momentum.

“I see it as meeting students where they are,” said undergraduate instructor Jim Van Elswyk, MD. “Students can have it on their phones, and this day and age – the digital age – it’s all about information and dissemination of information.

“If students get an e-mail from a professor, they have to get their computers, open them up, log on, the whole bit, to get information, whereas with Twitter, I can tweet out an article, students get notification about the article, they click on the tweet, and they’re taken to the article.

“With this generation of students,” he continued, “it’s all about rapidity. They’ve grown up with the Internet. They’re used to that rapidity. So it really is a great way to deliver content to the students the way they like to have it delivered, the way they’re used to getting it. I use it to tweet out articles that are relevant to the topics we study in class. I use it to disseminate information about our department and the College of Public Health.”

That morning, he said, he had tweeted announcement of an informal meeting between students and the dean. He also uses the popular social medium to network fundraisers for Operation Smile, a student organization that raises funds for the repair of cleft lip/cleft palate in children in low-resource areas. Van Elswyk, a recipient of the Golden Key Award, is a sponsor of the organization, which he noted is not affiliated with the Smile Train cleft palate surgical nonprofit.

Also the supervisor for the Survey of Human Disease course, which has three on-campus classes and three online classes, Van Elswyk said the COPH Twitter revolution serves as his speedy liaison between himself and the adjunct instructors, as well as the students in both the on-campus and online sections.

Van Elswyk is the USF COPH pioneer of this latest use of Twitter. Other instructors in undergraduate studies have quickly followed suit since he began implementation in October.

“I realized the potential it had, and I thought it would be something that we should add to our Office of Undergraduate Studies because it would have a very positive effect – positive effect on us, positive effect on our students, positive effect on the level of education. We’ve gotten a lot of positive responses – really, no negative responses.”

Accordingly, Van Elswyk already has made a Twitter account a requirement for each of his students, and said it’s an easy sell.

“It doesn’t cost anything,” he said. “You don’t have to put it on your phone, but you can if you want to, or you can put it on your computer.”

If you want to use it only for academic purposes, he said, some of the instructors have separate school accounts and personal accounts. Students are free to apply the same approach. The daily interconnection of instructors with instructors, students with students, and instructors with students facilitates an academic application of social media that challenges their often antisocial image.

“We all use Twitter,” Van Elswyk said. “We all follow each other. So, as a result, when I tweet out an article, the other instructors get an idea of what I’m discussing in my class. When the other instructors tweet out an article, I understand what they think is important for their classes and what they’re doing. So it really ties us all together. As opposed to us having different classes and different offices where sometimes our pathways don’t connect at all, with Twitter, we’re interconnected.

“It’s a great modality that I think has a lot of use here on the college campus, and for us here at the College of Public Health, we’re taking advantage of it. Social media is huge, and Twitter is part of social media, and so we feel fortunate that we’re able to be as current as we are about this.”

 

Story by David Brothers, College of Public Health.