Munir Mandviwalla

Professor, Milton F. Stauffer Senior Research Fellow
Executive Director, Institute for Business and Information Technology

Faculty/Staff

Is That All There Is? Taking Education to New Levels in the Social Media Era

Munir Mandviwalla, David Schuff, Manoj Chacko, and Laurel Miller

Abstract

Higher education in the United States faces major challenges: increased competition from non-traditional players, online programs that are eroding regional monopolies, shifting demographics, the perceived irrelevance of some degrees, and the development of low-cost certification alternatives to those degrees. In other industries, information technology (IT) has played a major role in responding to the challenges of change by creating new products and services, consolidating operations, and innovating. Yet in higher education, IT has been used largely to automate isolated processes (e.g., a new recruiting system) or to produce small, localized wins (e.g., using Twitter inside a class). So we ask ourselves, in the words of Peggy Lee, “Is that all there is?” In this article, we show how social media-enabled platforms can enable transformation in educational experiences and outcomes and illustrate our ideas by describing the community platform of the Department of Management Information Systems in Temple University’s Fox School of Business.

Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning. Vol. 45-5, pp-51-58. 2013.

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