Social media and anatomy education: Using twitter to enhance the student learning experience in anatomy

Abstract

Neuroanatomy is a difficult subject in medical education, with students often feeling worried and anxious before they have even started, potentially decreasing their engagement with the subject. At the University of Southampton, we incorporated the use of Twitter as a way of supporting students' learning on a neuroanatomy module to evaluate how it impacted upon their engagement and learning experience. The #nlm2soton hashtag was created and displayed (via a widget) on the university's virtual learning environment (VLE) for a cohort of 197 Year 2 medical students studying neuroanatomy. Student usage was tracked to measure levels of engagement throughout the course and frequency of hashtag use was compared to examination results. Student opinions on the use of Twitter were obtained during a focus group with eleven students and from qualitative questionnaires. The hashtag was used by 91% of the student cohort and, within this, more students chose to simply view the hashtag rather than make contributions. The completed questionnaire responses (n = 150) as well as focus group outcomes revealed the value of using Twitter. A negligible correlation was found between student examination scores and their viewing frequency of the hashtag however, no correlation was found between examination scores and contribution frequency. Despite this, Twitter facilitated communication, relieved anxieties and raised morale, which was valued highly by students and aided engagement with neuroanatomy. Twitter was successful in creating and providing a support network for students during a difficult module. Anat Sci Educ 9: 505-515. © 2016 American Association of Anatomists.

Social Media use within medical education: A systematic review to develop a pilot questionnaire on how social media can be best used at BSMS

“…The speed of feedback was also noted by Hennessy et al (2016) to be a strength of social media and in particular Twitter. Several students reported that it helped over the revision period as feedback was rapid and concise due to the 140-character limit.…”

“…Webb et al (2015) concluded that Twitter is not a replacement for existing aspects of medical education but that it should be considered as a useful adjunct to the curriculum as students found it added to their education. There were however questions raised over its utility given that each Tweet can only be 140 characters long (Hennessy et al, 2016). Moreover, there remains some concern that this short style of communication will encourage poor writing habits and grammar among students (Grosseck and Holotescu, 2008).…”

“…This tool is not unique to YouTube and can also be found on Facebook and Twitter which allows the administrators to track page interactions and popularity (Ekarattanawong et al, 2015;Gaglani and Haynes, 2014;Hennessy et al, 2016;Jaffar, 2014). These activity measures however are limited to the administrator and their activity.…”

“…These activity measures however are limited to the administrator and their activity. For example Twitter Activity can only track the user's tweets and not the tweets or comments made by others (Hennessy et al, 2016). Hennessy et al (2016) stress the importance of faculty involvement as without their input social media as an educational tool would not be effective.…”

#colorectalsurgery

“…Using the online social media analytical program CREATION Pinpoint, original tweet creation was tracked using the hashtag phrase #colorectalsurgery and the number of tweets that were 'retweets'. Retweets are [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] 21-80 81-300 301-6369 1-4 0 mentions akin to direct quotations of other users' tweets, and so retweeting is a near-instantaneous method of digitally broadcasting and/or disseminating the content of another user; this directly widens the scope of the audience. Data relating to the number of 'impressions' (views) of all tweets, and the number of users who had used the hashtag at least once, were also extracted.…”