A presentation by
Athanasios Trantafylidis, School of Business and Economics

When: Monday, January 21, 15:00–16:00

Where: Deree Faculty Lounge

Organized by: Faculty Research Seminars 2018-19 Series

Abstract

Learning Management Systems (LMS) have been largely adopted by higher education institutions. Being mostly used as knowledge repositories, they offer a notable advantage of making learning content globally available, free of time and location limitations as long as there is access to the Internet. Existing LMS platforms currently provide with the technical infrastructure required to apply constructive learning methods supporting traditional ones, given the availability of eLearning design expertise. Despite the LMS performance, technical innovation and access to unlimited eLearning material, it seems that LMS implementations have failed producing and maintaining a critical mass of engaged learners. Consequently, LMSs seem to be used primarily as learning-related content repositories instead of learning enablers. At the same time, Social Networks’ (SN) services and technologies have achieved impressive engagement by both students and instructors. Additionally, through their mobile applications, they have succeeded to become an inseparable ubiquitous daily habit of vast numbers of users, with Facebook being on the front line with more than two million active users. This paper presents a case study deployed at a higher education institution where a flipped classroom learning methodology was implemented through the means of combining LMS with Social Network services in an introductory course in Information Systems. The goal is to recognize potential benefits for student learning and educational practices by taking advantage of the given student engagement to social media (SM). For this purpose, a flipped classroom exercise was simultaneously deployed to a controlled group of students through both Blackboard (LMS) and Facebook (SN), aiming firstly at collecting access and usability evidence and secondly at determining engagement variations in respect to the level of engagement and the behavior of students in using each one of these platforms. Furthermore, students who participated in this exercise were asked to complete a web survey in order to assess their preference on the technologies and methods used in this exercise. The usage and survey data produced by this case were analyzed and will be presented in this paper.

Short Bio

Athanasios Triantafyllidis has served as a consultant, trainer and developer in several domestic and multinational corporations. Following that, he became an eCommerce entrepreneur. Since 1993, he has also served as a part-time faculty member of Deree College. In 2004, he shifted his career to serve as a full-time member of the faculty within the CIS Department teaching courses across the curriculum. He currently teaches Introduction to Information Systems, Business Information Systems, Electronic Commerce, Information Systems Security & Control and Analysis and Design of Information Systems. His current research interests are focused on Blended & Mobile Learning and Banking & Financial Information Systems.