Skip to main content

Table 2 Participants’ experiences using social media for formal learning purposes

From: Nursing students’ use of social media in their learning: a case study of a Canadian School of Nursing

Theme

Participant Quotes

Sharing or clarifying course content

I know I post some of my own, like, kind of study notes or, like, little cheats and tricks and kind of things for certain difficult concepts and I, you know, share it with my classmates so whether or not they use it, I don’t know but I definitely share my own knowledge just to try to help other people (P6)

Being distance ed, watching YouTube videos kind of grounds the, um, experience, I suppose. It’s adding that little extra. A lot of the stuff I do is reading and listening to teachers talk on like a video livestream, um, and it just feels like there’s an extra dimension that’s missing from online learning so watching YouTube videos kinda just fills in that extra little space you miss from … face-to-face teaching (P7)

Supplementing university services

[S]ometimes we use a classroom platform and the profs will post their PowerPoints on there and sometimes you get to class in the morning and the platform’s crashed for whatever reason. So, people will just, like, upload the file to Facebook and that way we can grab it off of there (P6)

Assignments and exams

We were placed with the health unit, um, and they had developed a new… mandate saying that for students in, I believe it was JK or SK had to get mandated vision treatment in school, kind of like they get, um, the dental screenings done in school. So our job was to kind of raise awareness and develop a Facebook campaign for their Facebook page to talk about different reasons why they should get vision screening and the impacts that it has on the student… so we developed four Facebook posts that had to kind of revolve around that or about funding options related to, like, if your student was recommended for more screenings after their initial one in school, um, then here is a post about different funding options, whether it’s OHIP or ODSP or anything like that (P1)

[F]or exams we’ll form a collective group and each of us will list the chapters that we’ve covered, each one of us will take an assigned chapter to do a review of and then we’ll just post all the files, so we have summaries of everything. Um, yeah, it’s actually quite cool ‘cause then that way, you know, we did it for a midterm this term and it’s nice not having one person, not having to go through and do a full review of, you know, 21 chapters (P2)