Twitter Use and its Effects on Student Perception of Instructor Credibility by DeGroot, Young and VanSlette (2015) explores a quantitative and qualitative approach to how Twitter can support the credibility of an instructor for a student. This paper is a great example of the challenges that exist in trying to do quantitative work in an education environment. The study created three Twitter profiles, one that only posted professional tweets, one that only posted personal tweets and one that posted a blend of professional and personal tweets. They then took a random sample of students, at the undergrad level with a mean age of 20, and had them rank the credibility of the instructor based on various metrics, on a 7-point scale.

“Participants rated the professional Twitterfeed significantly more credible than the social Twitterfeed (M = 5.49, SD = 0.87 versus M = 4.70, SD = 0.87, p < /001), and the professional Twitterfeed was also marginally more credible than the blended Twitterfeed (M = 5.14, SD = 0.92, p = .06). Further, students rated the blended Twitterfeed as significantly more credible than the social Twitterfeed (p < .05).”

The results look fantastic! Every professor should go out, create a Twitter profile, and start Tweeting a professional feed. This results do start to look a little less fantastic once the study is looked at in more depth, however. To the credit of DeGroot, Young and VanSlette, they do bring up most of the challenges of this study. I also, through my biased lens, see some challenges in extrapolating these results outside of this specific study. The largest challenge I see with this is the study is based on a first impression opinion of an instructor. The students did not have any personal connection with these different persona’s, in fact, the instructors were created for the purpose of this study. What we are really looking at in this study is the first impression of students of a professional instructor based on the types of Tweets that the instructor is making.

I am not a large social media consumer, or user, so am probably a little biased. I am curious how the impression of a professor would change based on this if the students were actually in the class. The challenge with this is creating an environment where the only difference for students is the Twitter feed. We could then find out the impact that Twitter could have on the level of credibility of the instructor.

For myself, this study is backed up a little bit by my real life experience. To get into EDCI 568 I was asked to have an informal telephone conversation with Dr. Valerie Irvine. After talking with her I became very intrigued, she made a few interesting comments about accessibility, student rights, and social equity specifically regarding her class. After our conversation I, for the first time in my academic career, Googled her to see what else I could find out about her. I was pleasantly surprised and I came across her Twitter feed and found it full of social justice, open source education, environmentalism, and equity. This allowed me to get excited about the class, and have a general feeling towards the positive experience I would have. I can specifically remember saying to my wife, “I think one of my classes will be a lot of fun, the professor sounds like kind of a bad ass.” From this stance, I can see how a digital footprint can cause a student’s opinion of an instructor to change. That being said, I suspect that interactions in person and throughout the class would outweigh and outshine any first impressions you would have based on a social media feed.

In the end, what the paper really came down to for me was the importance of relationships within a classroom. I have spent time with Tom Boland, co-creator of the Third Path, rebranded as The Centre for Relationship-Based Education – https://www.relationshipbasedschools.com/ and believe the level of stress they put on building relationships with students to foster academic success. DeGroot, Young, and VanSlette even allude to this in their paper as their study “also suggests that the students who use Twitter more frequently may think about their instructors who use Twitter differently. When presented with Twitter messages that were half social and half professional, the students who tweeted more frequently (more than a few times per week) rated these hypothetical instructors as more credible than did students who tweeted less frequently.” This supports the relationship based approach as these students would have a common interest as their instructors, Twitter.

In the end, using Twitter would probably be a positive point of access for students, but this is where I fall into a challenge. I have never been much for stating my opinion on a print format. Maybe this blog will provide me the comfort level to increase my Twitter game.

After reading The effect of Twitter posts on students’ perceptions of instructor credibility by Kirsten A. Johnson (2010) and it basically affirmed my thoughts about DeGroot’s article. In the end, these two studies draw different conclusions, based on the same type of experimental design. Johnson’s is much smaller, and only a single campus, but the general design – three artificial Twitter accounts, one social, one professional, one blended, random assignment of students into each account, and then rating the credibility of the instructor – is pretty much the same.

My biggest conclusion from these papers is that actual quantitative data on social patterns and perception that is relatable to a non-artificial environment is very difficult. In the end, I do not think either of the papers did anything incorrect, their data is there data. I would be interested to see the difference between their Twitter identities and their definition of social and professional tweets, as this may have played a factor.

I believe in the strengths of relationships in helping education, and if Social Media can help increase and strengthen the relationships you have with your students, then maybe, as an educator, I should make more of an effort to use it. As long as I can do it in an authentic manner, that is appropriate and not too personal.