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JOHANNA ANNALA PhD, is senior lecturer at School of Education, University of Tampere. Research interests include personal development planning, curriculum studies and guidance in higher education.MARITA MÄKINEN PhD, is research director at School of Education, University of Tampere. Research interests include literacy education, special education, curriculum studies, and higher education.PÄIVI SVÄRD MA, is researcher at School of Education, University of Tampere. Interests include online pedagogy and social media in education.KIRSI SILIUS M.Ed, is researcher at Tampere University of Technology. She is carrying out her doctoral thesis in hypermedia. The topic is modelling pedagogically personalized and adaptive hypermedia content production and web services. THUMAS MIILUMÄKI is researcher in at ABSTRACTThis paper illustrates how university students describe the benefits and challenges of online community environment (OCE) in promoting engagement in university studies. The sociocultural framework allows gaining understanding of the engagement in learning processes as well as the collaborative dimensions of OCE in developing higher education in the 21th century. The study was conducted by using the method of empathy-based stories. The data were collected from two student groups representing samples of presumed forerunners of online and offline environments. The results revealed the importance of multidimensionality of engagement, with interaction among and between students and staff. OCE was seen beneficial in strengthening the sense of belonging to the university, in networking and in enhancing active citizenship. The students saw the academic and social world overlapping. OCE was not seen as an alternative but supplementary to offline community, being beneficial for learning and extracurricular activities. The results represent four overlapping spheres that reflect the potentials of OCE in enhancing engagement in studies: supportive reciprocity, collegial contribution, growth of expertise and shared direction. In order to enhance engagement in university studies via OCE, the results suggest that the focus should be on the sociocultural practices and pedagogical processes.

Social media enhanced learning systems bring new challenges to evaluate learning environments. Many features are common with any websites and can be evaluated with common criteria. But with social media users can also contribute content, change opinions and create communities for different needs, which bring new dimensions to a quality evaluation. This research focused on finding out which are the most important characters and functions in social media enhanced learning system in the context of higher education. The paper also reports the former research results that were used as a background for this study. Earlier researches were carried out in 2008-2009 and they focused on how to evaluate social media sites, what are the students' expectations and what motivates them to use social media in higher educational context.

Abstract-In this article, we introduce the results of a study concerning user data visualizations in the context of the TUT Circle, a social media enhanced web service for learning, networking, and communication at the Tampere University of Technology (TUT). Well-designed visualizations can provide valuable insight into student activity and participation in an online course, and therefore support both teachers' and students' strategic decision making. We found social network analytics and visualizations useful in providing information to improve the pedagogical practices of online courses, as well as the students' overall engagement in their studies and study lives. However, to be useful, the visualizations need to have enough hints so that the users can interpret the different elements in them in the right way.Index Terms-Learning, learning analytics, social network services, visualization of user data.

TUT Circle, a dedicated social media service for students at Tampere University of Technology (TUT), was used as a learning environment for the purpose of enhancing students‘ collaboration, communication and networking skills required in business and working life and for promoting peer learning in small groups. Unfortunately, active conversation was limited. The students intensively read content created by other students, but they did not actively present their opinions, arguments or comments. Another reason for the lack of real conversation was procrastination. The students seemed to need more encouragement to comment on or question the ideas of others, more support to promote intergroup interaction and more assistance with time management