Professors Try Teaching With TikTok. But It’s Not for ‘Boring, Lecturing Things.’
When COVID-19 compelled school programs on-line, Stuart Middleton, a senior lecturer on the University of Queensland in Australia, was having hassle connecting along with his distant college students. So he determined to attempt to meet them the place he heard they had been glad to spend time — on TikTok.
He began creating movies on TikTok, and he labored to make his posts match the playful spirit of the platform. In lots of his movies, he acts out scenes from well-known Hollywood movies, besides swapping in phrases from the strategic administration programs he teaches.
In one in every of them, for occasion, he performs the a part of Clint Eastwood’s character within the movie “Dirty Harry,” in an iconic scene the place he asks, “Do you feel lucky?” Except, as an alternative of claiming “Have I fired six shots or only five today?” the professor says, “Have I analyzed five forces or only four,” referring to a administration concept often known as Porter’s Five Forces.
@stumid0 Do you are feeling fortunate? #portersfiveforces ♬ original sound – Stu Mid208
Other clips he’s created characteristic modified scenes from “Zoolander,” “The Sixth Sense” and “Titanic.”
The professor admits it’s “corny stuff,” however he says he was impressed by watching different high TikTok influencers, such because the performer Drake.
“He’s doing heaps of corny stuff,” Middleton tells EdSurge. “This is the way he’s relating.”
It seems he’s not the one professor experimenting with TikTok of their courses. It’s laborious to determine how widespread the follow is, however some students, including Middleton, have lately revealed papers in tutorial journals about their experiences. And a couple of TikTok profs have even gone viral.
But the TikTok platform can be more and more controversial. At least 20 state universities across the U.S. have blocked the use of TikTok on their campus networks, usually to adjust to new state legal guidelines and laws barring the app on state-owned units and networks. Officials in these states argue that the platform, owned by an organization in Beijing, is a menace to cybersecurity, or they’re involved about spying by the Chinese authorities.
Even so, information reveals that TikTok is the place college students congregate today. Sixty-seven p.c of U.S. teenagers say they use the service, in response to a recent Pew Research Center survey, and TikTok lately surpassed Google because the most-visited website on the web.
Will it come to play a job in school lecture rooms?
Bringing Science to the Public
One of Caitlin Light’s many duties as an assistant professor at Binghamton University is operating the social media accounts for the first-year analysis immersion program, and college students shortly had some recommendation for her: No one makes use of Instagram anymore. Students now are all on TikTok.
So she determined to experiment with making TikToks of her personal — with the assistance of her college students.
“I’m an expert with what students struggle with and what they need to know,” she says. “And they’re the experts on what’s going on with TikTok right now.” Plus, she added, determining TikTok may be like “going down a rabbit hole.”
Many of the posts Light has made have targeted extra on motivating college students fairly than delivering instruction.
And she knew she needed to make it fascinating from the start to get anybody to look at.
“If it’s a boring, lecturing thing — like you’d see with a YouTube video — you’re going to get scrolled right by,” she says.
One of her posts reveals Light bursting into the laboratory in a white lab coat and dancing to a pop music that was widespread on TikTok on the time, whereas a halo-like impact flashes round her. Text on the display says: “Me entering the lab second semester of FRI excited to perfect my lab skills, be a good team member and make new discoveries!”
@fribing FRI Spring 2023 right here we come! #binghamtonuniversity ♬ Im Good CLEAN David Guetta Bebe Rexha – dancetoktrends
The objective, she stated, was “to build some momentum and enthusiasm for the semester.”
As she discovered extra about TikTok, she determined to make creating quick posts an task for the category. She challenged college students to place their TikTok abilities to make use of explaining science ideas, and what analysis appears to be like like, to the general public with posts.
“The biggest piece for me using this in the classroom is helping my students explain their research to normal people,” Light says. “Our research is for the people and it’s for making change in the world. If we can’t get people interested in it, we’re not getting money, we’re not creating impact. People aside from our little academic bubble have to be interested.”
She and a colleague revealed a journal article about their expertise final 12 months, known as “TikTok: An Emergent Opportunity for Teaching and Learning Science Communication Online.”
“It is the ethical responsibility of researchers to disseminate findings with the public in a timely way,” the paper concludes. “As the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, effective science communication is vital to fulfilling that obligation. Inspiring the next generation of science communicators will continue to improve science communication, making exciting discoveries accessible to everyone.”
‘It’s a Language That the Kids Speak’
Shauna Pomerantz, a professor of kid and youth research at Brock University, in Canada, doesn’t make TikToks of her for courses, however she finds methods to play clips from TikTok in her lectures.
“I bring TikToks in all the time,” she says. Just this week, she says, she gave a lecture about racism. “I showed a compilation of TikToks of Black mothers showing their Black daughters the trailer for the new ‘Little Mermaid’ movie which has Halle Bailey in it,” she says. “I used this TikTok video as a way to talk about how representation matters.”
She sees TikTok as the newest in an extended custom of professors utilizing widespread tradition and youth tradition to attach with college students.
“If you’re not on it, you’re missing out on a conversation,” Pomerantz says. “This is why teachers are gravitating to it, because they know it’s where the kids are and it’s a language that the kids speak.”
Pomerantz grew to become taken with TikTok early within the pandemic, when her then-11-year-old daughter discovered consolation scrolling by means of movies there. She ended up inviting her daughter to collaborate on a analysis mission together with her about TikTok, to doc the platform’s function in younger individuals’s lives.
“There’s so many wedges on TikTok that you can’t really talk about it as one thing,” Pomerantz says. “It’s like being at a big high school where you will find your people and you will ignore the rest.”
Not everybody thinks professors must be encouraging using TikTok, which many see as a distraction that may maintain college students from paying consideration at school or their research. And others complain that it perpetuates a skimming-over-the-top perspective towards info.
“These little videos can perpetuate mythology, incorrect information, slanted views and actually discourage critical thinking,” educational consultant Paul Bennett told the CBC News, in an article they wrote about Pomerantz’s experiment.
Middleton, the professor in Australia, says he was initially reluctant to embrace social media in teaching, and that he rarely uses Twitter himself and at one point canceled his Facebook account in protest.
But he decided to give TikTok a try, especially since so many of his students were international students from China, where the service originates. Still, he makes a point to post all of his videos to the learning management system so even those who don’t use social media can see them. “I don’t want my students who don’t have a TikTok account to miss out on this content,” he provides.
“Would I encourage my students to be on social media all the time? No,” Middleton says. “But they’re not going to get off of social media because I told them to.”
