Social media has both taken over our lives and our students, as is the understanding for many schools around the country. Whether you are in secondary schools or colleges, social media has become an integral part of everyone’s life, and has even helped boost enrollment in online colleges and education. With the recent blow-up of Twitter, news agencies and political groups have become increasingly dependent on social media devices. We have now reached a point where we do not know what to do if our service is temporarily disconnected; we even have our “smart phones” hooked up to these sites in order to receive constant updates from the sites.
How does online education play into this? Online colleges emerged at the same time as social media was beginning to take off. As a result, the two coincided with their advertising campaigns and both have helped each other to gain credentials within the online community and educational community. Social media is now the fastest way to get up-to-the-moment updates on news and gossip, and the ability of schools to manipulate this for their use is a technological feat in itself. Since this point a few years ago, when social media truly took off, schools have been hesitant to allow access within their halls.
Most secondary schools have banned the programs because of situations like the young girl in Missouri who killed herself because of cyber-bullying. This is the extreme of social media, but it was not taken lightly by any school. Online colleges do not fit into the same square as traditional high schools and junior highs, but have similar issues regarding social media. They are still not sure whether to embrace the websites wholeheartedly and place information on Facebook and Twitter, or whether they should continue to shun the sites like so many other graduate institutions.
However, online colleges are placed in an interesting predicament. Because they depend on the internet for their main source of profit and communication with their students, many schools have embraced social media as an easy way for mass communication. What better way to communicate with students than through a Tweet or a Facebook message? Gone are the formal days of email and they have instead been replaced with fast-paced updates that are 140 characters or less. The fast pace of social media has additionally trickled into online colleges, as most professors do not enjoy the drawn-out lectures and instead manipulate their classes so that they are easily accessible by their technologically-savvy students and can be updated without too much work.
We are living in a different age, one that is obsessed with a fast-paced lifestyle; as much as we all love it at the moment, will we manage to slow it down in the future or will we be stuck on the social media path of life?
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