Students checking Facebook in class may no longer be ignoring what the professor has to say. Instead, they may be connecting with classmates or discussing course content on ASU’s official Facebook application.
With the launch of the “ASU on Facebook” application, the University is using the social networking site to connect and engage with its students.
“The Facebook application was adopted primarily as a means of integrating students socially into ASU activities,” said Lisa McIntyre, who works on the project on behalf of the Provost’s office. “They can see and choose activities that interest them, get to know classmates, associate with students with common interests and form common geographic areas. Students can even begin interaction with fellow incoming freshmen prior to arriving at ASU.”
Michael Staton, CEO of Inigral Inc., which designed the application, described it as a social networking site that lives inside of Facebook.
The application is available to all ASU students and staff with an existing Facebook account and can be accessed through a hyperlink on MyASU.
After clicking the link, students type in their graduation years and their courses are automatically added and matched with the default pictures from their profiles.
Larry McLennan, a global studies senior and member of the Facebook support team that gauges student response, said students shouldn’t have to worry about privacy or security within the application.
ASU on Facebook users can’t see each other’s personal profiles and have the option to hide their course schedule.
The new Blackboard?
McLennan acknowledged that both students and teachers have expressed some concerns about the application, including privacy and cheating, but said with time it will become a normal part of attending ASU.
“Ten years ago a lot of students and professors were hesitant with using Blackboard, and now I can’t imagine a class without it,” he said. “We’re trying to move into that same dimension, where it’s just part of the classroom: asking questions, talking about organizations, sports, whatever it may be. The only reason the classes are listed is so you can see who classmates are.”
Currently the application has approximately 10,000 users, a number McLennan said he hopes will double by the end of the semester.
Biology senior Melanie Stivers said she’s not concerned with privacy, but she can’t foresee the application becoming as popular as Blackboard.
“It’s easier to just use Blackboard. Every enrolled student is going to have access to that,” Stivers said. “The application is fairly easy to use, but it’s about the same as Blackboard and MyASU. The only perk is that you can see people’s pictures and therefore be able to recognize them better in class, and since it’s Facebook, communication will probably be less formal.”
A place to connect
Some professors have expressed concerns this informal environment may lead to cheating, McLennan said.
The application does allow professors to deactivate their courses, but very few professors have asked for this, he said.
Life sciences professor Kevin McGraw said he’s not surprised this concern has been raised, but thinks the application will eventually become beneficial.
“There’s going to be some attention on what can be used in the wrong ways, but if everyone proceeds cautiously, … I think we can get to a point where students get more involved with their peers through it rather than just sticking their heads in a textbook all alone,” McGraw said. “I see it as a incentive for student-to-student interaction.”
Staton and McIntyre both said the application isn’t intended to replace Blackboard but simply to enhance it as a way for students to connect with each other.
Life of the third party
The idea for the application came a few years ago when Facebook deleted its “courses” feature, which allowed students to insert their classes and search for people who included the same information in their profiles.
When Facebook platforms launched, allowing third-party applications not run by the site, Staton and a few others went to work designing a replacement.
The original idea was to design something that could potentially replace Blackboard.
“We had a courses application that became very popular. We got more than 1 million users over the course of a year, but when we looked at what students and colleges wanted to do, they didn’t want to replace Blackboard,” Staton said. “They saw Facebook as a much more social space, so instead of continuing to make a courses application, we decided we would make a much bigger product geared toward individual universities.”
And thus, ASU on Facebook was born.
Inigral Inc. currently has 11 different colleges at various stages of launching the application, but ASU is the first to deploy it school-wide and is by far the largest of the company’s customers, Staton said.
Staton said he hopes the application will enrich students’ experiences at ASU.
“Part of the overarching vision is to get people connected quicker,” Staton said. “We want to give [students] the tools they need to reach out to other people in their classes, find activities to get involved in, and really get into that Sun Devil spirit.”
Reach the reporter at keshoult@asu.edu
