In a classroom more than a hundred students in any one lecture theatre, it is difficult for any lecturer to give due attention to each student. However, one lecturer at UCSI University did not let that get in her way of ensuring each of her student receives the level of attention he or she deserves. Shahrinaz Ismail, a lecturer at the Faculty of Management and IT, “connects” with each of her student by taking her classroom to the social networking websites.

Facebook, Youtube and blogs, are the tools Shahrinaz uses to engage her students in classroom assignments and discussions. While Shahrinaz conducts her daily lessons as usual in normal class setting, she also continues her lessons online. “I use post links and other resources on my Facebook, to guide students to other materials on the internet that would help them in their assignments,” she says. Shahrinaz also makes it a point to display videos for her students which are related to their assignments on Youtube, thus, giving them a better understanding of applying the theories they learnt.

Another reason why Shahrinaz conducts part of her classroom lessons online is the diversity among her students. More than 30% of UCSI University students are international students, including multi-ethnic Malaysians. Managing such students outside the classroom is a monumental task. “At any one time, I could have students from almost ten different countries: from Nigeria, Iran, China, India, Kenya, to name a few; all of whom are accustomed to different learning methods.

But what all these students share in common is that they belong to at least one social networking site. According to a research Shahrinaz has done, 91.86% of her students belong to at least one social networking site, while 82.56% have an account with Facebook. It also helps that the subject she teaches is Internet Technologies. “The social networking sites enables me to demonstrate to my students how to apply materials learnt during lectures in a real-life setting,”

Among her objectives on assignments given on the social networking sites, is to put all her students on an even footing. Since Facebook is the one thing that all her students share, getting them to go to that site ensures that they are all equal to begin with. Thus, her students are first asked to join a “group” on Facebook where they have to introduce themselves to one another. Although her students have already done this in class, an introduction on Facebook, being less formal, allows them a glimpse of their own personalities. Shahrinaz also sets up a class blog, which her students could visit to obtain notes from previous classes, and also for submitting their assignments. Through Facebook, her students could notify her once they had submitted or completed their assignments, whereupon she will check on their work at home.

The students’ Facebook has also become a place where they could ‘advertise’ for ‘vacancies’ in their project groups and update their website lecturers about their projects. Shahrinaz has also made it a project requirement to include links from student projects into their own Facebook profiles. Thus, students have to post links of both their previous assignment and the current assignment for comparison. This allows both Shahrinaz and the students to record for themselves their improvements as the class progresses.

For Shahrinaz, one of the main advantages of using the social networking sites with her students is the immediate feedback she receives on her teaching methods, and the work that she assigns them, “I get immediate feedback on the work that I assign them, and get to witness for myself whenever my student goes through an epiphany and gleans the essence of the materials that I share with them.” She terms this as the “Aha!” moment her students go through which she witnesses online.

When asked about how she keeps her personal life separate from her work-life, she said: “The students are a part of my everyday routine, and to a certain extent, they have become a part of who I am, so no, I don’t separate my personal life, as my students are my life.”

Shahrinaz Ismail won The Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Research and Innovation in Information Systems, organised by the Faculty of Computer Science and Information System at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. She wrote about class management via social networking sites. Her blog, highlighting her work, other initiatives can be found here.