The role of Web 2.0 technologies in higher education: a case of teaching customer relationship management concepts

The use of Web 2.0 technologies in education has been established for several years and there are numerous successful examples in the relevant literature. The development of tools, practices and supporting pedagogies helped shifting the role of the World Wide Web from a repository and information retrieval mechanism towards social mediation and user-generated content as advocated by Conole and Alevizou (2010). Similarly we have witnessed the introduction of the education 2.0 and e-learning 2.0 concepts, referring to the integration of Web 2.0 technologies in learning settings, integrated with institutional systems as described by Lwoga (2012).
The authors have been engaged in research studies emphasising the importance of social media as enablers for teaching and learning tasks. More specifically, the authors’ research is focused on the use of social media and in particular Facebook for simulating Customer Relationship Management (CRM) scenarios in learning teams. The scope of the research is to investigate whether competencies, skills and understanding can be developed through scenario-based social media integration. The authors’ hypothesis is that the introduction of a maturity model classifying the readiness of learning groups and subsequently organisations in CRM adoption helps the identification of key learning and training areas that need further development and support.
This paper describes current work relating to a creative approach in using Facebook as an instruction tool for teaching and learning in the field of CRM. The proposed approach identifies key dimensions and associated factors affecting the learning process in structured scenarios. The work presented in the paper covers two pilot studies conducted in two subsequent years over eight-week periods. The first pilot involved 35 learners, while the second pilot involved more than 50 residing both in the UK and UAE. The paper presents the method followed for the utilisation of social media in the learning process and discusses findings from data analysis (learning analytics using NVIVO and SPSS) as well as social media use patterns (NODEXL).
The paper also describes possible use of the proposed method as a guiding mechanism for establishing teaching and learning support with integrated social media functionality and subsequent analysis of the learning process and student interaction patterns.