Case: Masters of Communication

This years' masters students of Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam were invited to join a social network prior to the beginning of their studies and about one third of them did. Besides showing name, photo and personal interests their profiles also tell which master programme they applied for and what they would like to achieve through that. Users were grouped by programme and could of course become friends as well as leave each other comments. Photos of common activities during the introduction days were afterwards posted on the network.
Usage peaked during the first days of the semester, about 40 of 50 users visited the network. Students had a look at their future classmates, became friends with some of them and left comments on their profiles. Three months later, usage has declined and students make almost no use of the network anymore. This did not come unexpected as the network was primarily meant for introducing students to each other and to coordinating staff. For more study related things, Blackboard is used (which, in the current setup used by the UvA, lacks the social possibilities we were looking for).

Earlier, a similar service was introduced at Communication Science: participants of seminars are asked to fill in their interests and upload a photo on a profile page. By viewing the profiles, instructors are able to adjust the focus of their lectures to the interests of their students. Also, instructors have reported finding it very helpful to be able to view photos of their students beforehand as it helps them learning names and makes the group less anonymous.

A following step could be interweaving these two concepts. Link students to their courses and future instructors, thereby giving students the ability to network with fellow students and instructors the ability to get to know their students in advance.

Questions remain, amongst other, about the nature of networks like these. German Facebook clone studivz is open for everyone, though meant for students only, and has been organizing users based on university and taken courses from the beginning. Contrary to that, Masters of Communication is an invitation based service, closed for the public, and set up by the university itself. Studivz is flexible, students keep using it at different universities, while our small network has been used only once for introductory matters. Should the university keep itself busy with social matters like this? Or should they be left to the students?