To Tweet or not to Tweet? That is the question....

As we know, COSTAATT actually has a Twitter account. Surprisingly it is an active account. The last tweet was advising students that the campus would not be open for Divali.
Before we mentioned COSTAATT has one Twitter account. However, upon further investigation we found four more:

COSTAATT Portal- 129 followers- 112 tweets (last tweet November 1- joined 2012)
COSTAATT Admissions- 50 followers - 6 tweets (last tweet November 13- joined twitter this year)
COSTAATT Library   - 43 followers- 18 Tweets (last tweet November 11-first tweet for the semester)
COSTAATT Events    - 51 followers - 0 Tweets (joined Twitter in 2010)
COSTAATT Social Club - 24 followers- 3 tweets (last tweet in September 2009!!)

Why is it that no more than 129 people follow COSTAATT in a school with thousands of Students? Is it a lack of advertising or students just aren't that interested? We were not able to ask the entire school population but we were determined to show that more than 129 people in COSTAATT use Twitter.

It was a bit challenging to ask more students but from the 50 asked they all had Twitter accounts and only 12 of them follow COSTAATT. When asked why the responses were:

- "I didn't know they had one".                                
- "Why follow them if they don't upkeep it?"
- "I'm not following them".
- "Girl I don't have time for COSTAATT".

Why this lack of interest?

We checked out foreign universities Twitter Accounts and they all have 3000 plus followers and their tweets are consistent with the last being a few hours ago.  All their social media accounts are advertised on their schools home page only social
media COSTAATT advertisers is FLICKR mainly for Grad pics.

Our local universities are way ahead of COSTAATT in the Twitter game. UWI joined Twitter in 2009 and currently has over 6,000 followers and tweets consistently about school related topics. However it is not advertised on their website. One account was discovered for UTT joined the same year as UWI but currently only have a little over 1000 followers with a bit of irregular tweeting. They advertise it on their website even though they have less followers than UWI.

So what's up with COSTAATT?

COSTAATT and Instagram

For those of you who don’t know what Instagram is, it’s a photo/video sharing and social networking app. In April 2012 they had over 10 million registered users and we are sure it surpassed this figure since it has only gained even more popularity since then.

• In our quest to find about COSTAATT’s use of social media, we found out that they do not have an Instagram account. We want to know is this necessarily a bad think?

Below are students suggestions both for an against COSTAATT Instagram account.

Students views

For

·      Many students believe they are bombarded with information everywhere they turn but Instagram offers a visual solution.

·      It’s a way to show students a side they re not accustom to seeing and develop a relationship with them. 

·      Provide visual information, like a picture of students in line waiting to pay fees with hashtags – school fees deadline

·      Can be used as a picture gallery – other than Flickr it can be used to post pictures of football matches, clubs and graduation.

·      Promotion of events

·      Showcase for student achievement like photography or even decorations to the building (Independence day) 

·      Good way to motivate students during exam periods using creative memes (see image below)

Possible Caption: Don't be this guy

Against

·      Some students believe students won’t follow COSTAATT on Instagram because ‘it’s a waste of their time’ and therefore defeating the purpose of creating the account in the first place.

•       The administration staff isn’t tech savvy to manage the account.

Our views

We think this would be a wise decision for COSTAATT to create an Instagram account. In the end it can only enhance their online presence and engage with the students and alumni that are already has profiles. They may even have potential to persuade some to create Instagram profiles.

Your Views

What are you thoughts?

Update time!! Where we started and where we are going....

     If you have been following our blog, you know what our project is all about but for our new followers we will sum it up in a nutshell. We are 6 mass communication students on a mission to find out if COSTAATT administration is using social media at its full potential to communicate with its students.

    This project started out with lots of brainstorming but we soon realized that putting these wonderful ideas into action is exhausting and time consuming with each of our busy schedules. However when things started to move from idea to action the workload began to fall on few particular group members. However being the good mass communications students we are, members were able to communicate (threaten) the rest of us to improve…or else!! As we all know, group projects are tough but once you are working with the right people they can be a breeze.

Even though our project is about improving communication through using social media, we realised that the college has a few problems. Upon speaking to students, we found out that the school's e-mail is not used as often as it should. It is a major communication tool but students for one reason or the other do not use it. We found the same problem with e-classroom. So before we continued with improving communication using social media we had to investigate these problems. I mean if COSTAATT is giving us tools to make our college experience easier and we are not using them, would anything else work?


What do you think?

E-Classroom and its potential.

    Potential can be defined as having or showing the capacity to develop into something in the future. But how long in the future will COSTAATT students have to wait for E-Classroom to realize its full potential?

    The College quotes on their website that:

     “At COSTAATT, we are committed to the highest levels of quality in our classes and programmes. We are equally committed to embracing the best in technology to aid and improve classroom interaction and learning, as well as to expand access to our programmes of study to students who may not be able to attend classes at one of our campuses.

    The E-Classroom allows our lecturers to conduct lectures, manage student discussions, administer quizzes and examinations, and provide immediate feedback on performance to students, among many other capabilities, all via the Internet, and all very secure. Classes can be conducted either entirely online, or in any combination of online and in-class activities.”

    As students however, how many of us have benefitted from anything more than a one dimensional experience. How many students can safely say “Without E-classroom I would indeed be lost”? The E-classroom allows for online interaction however it is far from mandatory. For some of us, only five out of the thirty plus courses we did incorporated e-classroom. However, most of them just used it as an archive for information.

    E-classroom has a lot of potential to make most of our lives easier:

• Filing assignments- It is super easy to file your assignments on e-classroom. Just drag, drop and click save. You even get an e-mail telling you that it was filed in case you were worried that you did not do it properly. Also, there is a calendar that reminds you that you have an assignment due.

• Examinations- There is a timer that follows you wherever you go. Once you are in the examination you cannot go google your answers as it monitors what you do. (It's an exam so I'll take this invasion of privacy.... but only this time). Also depending on the lecturer it is extremely easy to get an A on multiple choice. For one of our classes, the lecturer set it up as for each answer you got wrong they minus .2 of the mark. Also, you could have kept going till you got the right answer. You do the Math and compare it to doing a multiple choice in class. You will smile.

• Student discussions- I don't know how long you have been in the system but there was once this lovely thing called "Class participation - 10%". Now that, for some, was a super easy 10%. It was also the boost some depended on to get a good grade. Then they removed it like all the other good things. Here is a way they can bring it back. Lectures can post a discussion topic on the forum and students would then be required to post feedback. If they do this about five times for the semester for the 10%, they would make a lot of people happy. Also they can make the discussion about info they post in e-classroom forcing the students to read it. How easy is that!!

• Information zone- One of our lectures uses e-classroom to post the slides he covered in class as well as additional information on the topic. Another lecturer e-mails us the same information. So every week we get about two or three e-mails from this lecturer. Wouldn't it be easier just to utilise e-classroom?

• Make-up classes-  Only this semester some of us were able to see this as a possibility. One of our lecturers used this as a way of facilitating a make up class instead of going through the painstaking ordeal of trying to figure out what day is convenient for people and the trying to find a classroom and all the usual torture that takes place. One semester two lectures were on the verge of battling over a classroom at City Campus. Instead of all this, why not just use e-classroom?

    It is also used at the verdict of individual lecturer. This, more often than not, results in neglect and underutilization. As one someone mentioned in our post on Facebook the underutilisation might be a result of a lack of tech savvy students as well as teachers simply not knowing how to use the site and not willing to learn. E-classroom should be used as an educational aid and not a depository of useless information that simply remains untouched to be unearthed at some unknown date as a fossil after the fact.

    We plead with the collegiate, lend us your ears as we indicate the fact that E-classroom is indeed the bastard child of COSTAATT. But we must ask ourselves the question is this the best approach in 2013 the age of Twitter, Facebook and total technological advancement ?