Keynotes and Speakers for ITx 2018
Senior Lecturer in Accounting, Ara Institute of Canterbury
Trevor has over 25 years experience teaching across information technology and business disciplines in the tertiary education sector in New Zealand including the polytechnic and university sectors.
His PhD is in the use of educational technologies, with other research interests including the adoption of cloud-based accounting systems.
Trevor is currently a Senior Lecturer in Accounting at Ara Institute of Canterbury and is mainly teaching management accounting and accounting information systems.
Many researchers have commented on the extent of the suitability of Facebook as a means of interaction between students and staff in higher education. The purpose of this paper is to conduct an initial exploration of this topic amongst undergraduate students.
This research is an extension of two earlier pieces of research conducted by the authors that explored the use of Facebook for (a) interaction between students and staff in undergraduate courses in the wake of a crisis event and (b) interaction between students and staff in professional masters students in a context that was not in the wake of a crisis event at the same institution.
This paper explores the use of Facebook for interaction between students and staff in undergraduate courses, without being in the wake of a crisis event with the aim of being able to explain the differences in the findings of the earlier studies. This was done through summarising the findings of the two earlier studies and analsing the responses of 990 undergraduate students to the question of how they felt about using Facebook to interaction with students and staff.
The findings of this paper are consistent with the findings of the study based on the perceptions of professional masters students that included that the use of Facebook in this context is best limited to interaction between students and that its use should not be mandatory. Implications for further research were identified including the need to further explore the perceptions of undergraduate students and to explore the issues surrounding Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and the desire or need for privacy surrounding the use of social media.