Student teachers’ views of social media in an open distance learning teaching practice course

Abstract

The challenge for institutions of higher learning is to make provision for a technology integrated teaching and learning mode other than the conventional face-to-face method to accommodate the digital natives and empowering the digital immigrants. We cannot teach as we were trained during the 1980’s compare to the current student profile which most of them born during the 1990’s. This paper explores the use of social media to support economics education student teachers’ engagement in teaching practice at an open distance learning institution. Only sixty nine student teachers (n=369) registered for the SDEC00N blog (subject didactics economics), which was a pilot study to use blogging as an educational tool to support them during teaching practice placements for the following academic year. Only Economics education students were invited by e-mail message, blog and discussion forum as announcements on myUnisa webpage to complete an online social media survey (SMS). Findings indicated that there was a positive correlation between the frequency of student use of social media and their relationship with their peers and instructors as well as how they describe the overall quality of instruction and the preservice program, the results also highlight that there are many questions still be to be answered. As is so often the case with preliminary research the end result can be the formulation of more questions rather than answers. Before one can put these finding into practice ones needs to consider the limitations of this study that had preservice teacher candidates as its participants. Preservice students generally have a long history of positive educational experiences and high academic achievement. Thus, the conclusions may not be generalizable to the general undergraduate student population. Despite this, the results may be useful to instructors and administrators that work primarily with students enrolled in professional programs.