Who is not currently a member of any of the social networks available within the internet world? According to some studies, in Mexico, there are currently more than 100 million users on social networks, equivalent to 77% of the total population, and derived from the social situation due to the pandemic, the use of these during 2020 increased at 12.4%.
In addition, the statistics also indicate that these netizens spend an approximate time of 3 hours, 27 minutes a day to interact on the networks and that each of these people has an average of 10 apps or open social networks, within which they are Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, among others, and only 54.5% use them for work issues, how many do you have?
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With this data and taking advantage of the interest generated by these platforms, the following question arises: why are they not used as a learning strategy? The adoption to them already has, as well as the range of variants in content that can be found, as well as developed and that go from videos, audios or podcast, infographics, scientific articles, university theses, among others, is very vast.
Social networks are not only means of fun, recreation or leisure, in more than one of them, as in the case of LinkedIn, there is information of very high technical, scientific, university quality and from many experts in their field, in addition to have a large area of opportunity in its use, since it only has 16 million users, which represents only 16% of the beneficiaries of social media.
YouTube or Vimeo are a fertile space to locate videos of different interesting topics to incorporate as academic knowledge, which is why they have become one of the main sources of online content curation, which, if managed by experts in the fields They are truly useful, as they are accompanied by a particular didactics for each student profile. In this particular area there is a very wide field of action, since according to the statistics within the 20 most searched topics on YouTube there is no cultural or academic topic, on the contrary, movies, music, youtubers or video games.
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The case of TikTok is truly interesting, because it is the one with the highest growth in the last two years, although still far below YouTube, Facebook or Instagram, with a usage percentage of 39.2% and where you can find tutorials, explanatory videos , cooking or woodworking classes (a great example of micro elearning). In a video of maximum 3 minutes you can learn in a very simple, practical and illustrative way, topics of a very diverse nature.
With all this, there is no doubt that having a good didactic strategy with which to implement these applications can achieve true academic success; Of course, it must have a robust structure, which has a contextualization, application and evaluation of learning; all linked to the development of competencies and the achievement of learning objectives.
It is also true that there are serious drawbacks, since students, having access to these networks, can disperse their attention and lose focus of the objective that we are considering as developers or as an institution, which is why it is important to have rules and policies of use in the classroom, implement certain locks in the enablement of networks, in addition to curating or developing attractive content for each profile or academic level.
As the saying goes, if you can’t beat the enemy join him. Of course, without actually these platforms being considered as an enemy, in many cases they have become the main escape or distraction for students, so it will be better once and for all to integrate them into the curriculum and demonstrate that they can have a much more useful application, as well as productive with respect to the usual use.
Their proper use can develop important skills in future professionals, such as:
Collaborative and cooperative learning
Self learning
Investigation
Digital skills
Synthesis
Analysis
Reading comprehension
Based on the foregoing, it is essential to train and develop our teachers in the design of learning strategies supported by technology and in particular social networks, so that we increasingly refine the search and selection of content, take advantage of the synergies fostered by the users of these and always directed towards the achievement of the teaching objectives.
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Jesús Deloya, Director of Educational Innovation at Aliat Universidades *
The opinions expressed are solely the responsibility of their authors and are completely independent of the position and editorial line of Forbes Mexico.