Gestão do Relacionamento Social com o Estudante: comunicação educativa em redes sociais

Abstract

The expansion of the traditional teaching-learning environments into social networks, as well as the introduction of social apps in educational practices, have been gaining increased importance and attention by the academic and scientific communities. These environments and tools offer contexts and privileged means for social and educational interactions, collaborative knowledge building, and developing cooperation, amongst others. This draws on the immediacy of communication and on the persistent attention retention potential of social media.

However, the use of these environments for educational purposes requires socialisation among students and among teachers to go far beyond the formal classroom or institutional environment provided by the LMS, changing the roles of its intervenient and raising the need to understand and report on the newly established dynamics.

In this paper, we present and discuss the Social Student Relationship Management (SSRM) concept and a case study in which WhatsApp is used as a complementary tool for the teaching-learning process. The social and educational value of this tool is evaluated based on the analysis of more than four thousand messages exchanged in an informal community of international master students and on a survey that was used to capture the student’s perceptions.