It has been my experience that social media use in a professional context is very different than an educational context. Professionally, social media is used to network and develop business relationships. It is often also used to market a company or forward a brand. Educationally, social media is used to encourage collaboration, build digital literacy, and aid in knowledge management (Bates, 2014). The challenge I see in Professional Development is balancing professional and educational uses of social media. By that I mean, our learners would not want their professional social media feeds littered with educational content, yet they would likely enjoy using social media in our professional development programs. Realistically, I think learners would have to develop separate social media accounts for educational purposes (i.e. separate from their personal accounts/business accounts). We also have a social media policy which dictates what we are allowed to publically share and post related to the firm – making social media use a bit more complicated.
All that aside, I think social media would be a great tool to encourage learning and collaboration outside the formal classroom setting. Discussion forums or Twitter hashtags could help us keep our learners engaged and continue the conversation after a program ends. We are always encouraging our learners to take ownership of their professional development. I think incorporating social media would further this goal because learners would have to actively participate and drive course content. We have talked about creating an internally hosted learning blog. Perhaps we could encourage people to post on the blog as part of our live seminars (maybe even create our own tagging system).
I think social media integration must be considered when designing a program. You have to look at your program goals, content, and target audience and ask yourself, will this be beneficial? If the answer is yes, you should design the session with your social media strategy in mind. I don’t think that necessarily mean re-designing around social media but it must be thoughtfully incorporated – you cannot simply add it as an afterthought.
References
Bates, T. (2014). Pedagogical differences between media: Social media. In Teaching in digital age, Chapter 7. Retrieved from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/9-5-5-social-media/