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The Business Studies program at Stockton University offers a concentration in Financial Planning, one required course being FINA 3131 Retirement Planning. The instructor in that course noticed that traditional methods of readings assigned before class, followed by lecture and traditional class discussions seemed less effective: discussions were difficult because students were not prepared, in class students were distracted by their laptops/tablet/phones in non-productive ways, and they were underperforming expectations on tests.  This paper will discuss how the professor incorporated electronic and social media into the course delivery, and its impact on student outcomes.

 

The professor initiated the following over the Spring 2017 semester:

 

- Projecting articles in class and making them available before class.

- Creating a Twitter account and encouraging tweets on the assigned readings before class and projecting the Twitter page during class as well as having students follow along on their devices.

- The creation of a financial literacy blog, which posts to LinkedIn and connects to Twitter and Facebook.  Students were encouraged to follow and interact with the blog posts prior to class and throughout the “lectureâ€

 

The presentation will discuss pros and cons of these approaches.  In this pilot semester exam scores incrementally increased with mean scores rising 1.2%.  However, the classroom experience was much improved as the students were more engaged. The discussions were richer, and participation outside the class, before and after meeting, was increased.  An interesting side benefit was that past students who learned of the social media accounts also became engaged.

finance, education, linkedin, twitter, facebook, blog, media