Engaging Students through Blogs: Using Blogs to Boost a Course Experience

Shana and Abulibdehb define blog as “an online platform where an individual, or a number of people, is able to easily upload text, photo, video and other multimedia content and share it with an unlimited amount of internet users.” However, they also warn bloggers because when bloggers share something online then “it can be difficult to control who shares it, reads it, comments it, re-posts it and so on.” Shana and Abulibdehb suggest that blogging can be useful to write homework, critically dissect information and share ideas, theories and explanations. They use both quantitative and qualitative approaches for the study. During the academic year of 2011-2012 76 undergraduate and 123 graduate participate the study. Students were also asked to do the following:

• Create a blog

• Post educational and meaningful content related to their field of specialization, and support their posts with resources (e.g., videos, PowerPoints, PDFs, audio files, pictures, charts, website links, etc.)

• Add comments and answer questions about the content of the lecture after each class, and add related resources if applicable

• Engage in a meaningful discussion on other student's posts and comments.

• Follow other students’ blogs

• Follow and comment on the instructor’s blog (optional)

In this study Shana and Abulibdehb use four instruments; five-point Likert scale questions, student journals, final reports, and end of semester portfolios as represented by the students’ blogs. At the end of study, Shana and Abulibdehb indicate that “students’ responses were encouraging, reflecting a range of reactions with more positive emphasis than negative, with the majority of participants indicating that they would use blogs again in class.”

Shana, Z. A. and Abulibdehb, E. S. (2015). Engaging students through blogs: Using blogs to boost a course experience. International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, 10(1), 30-38. Retrieved from http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.libproxy.albany.edu/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=d5a52638-661c-4836-9d51-3d44f9ea7585%40sessionmgr113&vid=0&hid=126