Connecting with students on Facebook

With the rising popularity of social networking sites, such as Facebook, there has been growing concern about how teachers utilize them to connect with students. The responses and recommendations I’ve seen range from “there should be no connections” to “it’s up to the discretion of the instructor.”

Particularly among teachers of middle and high schools, I’ve seen much stronger recommendations, if not school district policies, against any social networking connections between teachers and students. Indeed, there have been a few cases where high school teachers have found themselves in trouble because of communications they have had with their students through Facebook.  Having no connection through Facebook certainly avoids a lot of pitfalls. The problem though, is that students who want to connect with teachers over Facebook do so to feel some sense of connection to the instructor. Students connect with their friends through Facebook.  If a teacher is inspiring or has established a meaningful relationship with a student, why can’t they connect with them on Facebook as well?  The answer is of course that the teacher-student relationship is different from a friend relationship.  However, that does not necessarily mean that there isn’t still the feeling of some sense of connection between teacher and student. The trouble though is trying to establish a clear-cut boundary between the teacher-student relationship area and other personal aspects of both the teacher and the student.

Among college teachers, I haven’t seen as clear guidelines about establishing connections, particularly over Facebook. The best advice I’ve seen suggests that, if teachers want to connect with their students through Facebook, they set up a professional Facebook profile which has limited personal information. It would be very much similar to any other professional website that the teacher sets up elsewhere.  That way, it is pretty clear where the boundary lies.  Students can’t access the teacher’s personal information; information a teacher would not share with students whether online or not. There are, at least, two problems with this approach. The first is that the boundary is very much a one-way mirror. A teacher’s private information is unavailable but all of the students’ private, personal information is visible. Right on the homepage, teachers might see who was drunk last night, who doesn’t feel like coming to class, and other such information that perhaps the student doesn’t intend the teacher to see, or information that the teacher wishes not to see. Advice I’ve seen recommend that teachers just ignore those sorts of information and do not respond to it.  Inevitably though, the cat is already out of the bag. The second problem is that, if other teachers are like me, we already have a personal Facebook account. It’s a bit of a hassle to have to set up another Facebook account just for students. Facebook and other third-party apps often assume you just have one Facebook account and thus managing 2+ accounts can become tedious.

The final strategy I’ve seen is to accept students as “friends” on Facebook only after they have graduated from the school/university. This avoids the whole confusion between the official teacher-student relationship.  I’m not sure if teachers necessarily desire their past students to see everything they post on their Facebook but perhaps can find no other suitable alternative to keep in touch with their past students.

I propose a different solution to the whole problem. Create a Facebook fan page of yourself. At first glance this seems to be a bit self-conceited. That opinion probably comes from the fact that some pages are fan pages of famous people/items/groups. It seems like you’d need to be popular to have a fan page. That’s not true, you can create fan pages for whatever interests you. Facebook fan pages solves much of the problems encountered in other approaches to connecting with students on Facebook. For one thing, you can continue to have your personal profile and a separate, professional “fan” page. Students that “like” your page, do not have access to your profile information and even more importantly, teachers don’t have access to student profile information either. Teachers can control the information on the page and an even greater plus, that information gets sent to each student’s profile updates. It’s right there on their homepage on Facebook. If you have important announcements, sending it through your page may be even more effective than sending it through email. You can still have a two way conversation with students as well. So, for example, even when you post an announcement on your page, a student with a question can leave it as a comment which you can then answer. When you do, not only the student sees it, but every other student as well. This avoids you having to answer the same question, over and over and over again.  Other useful functions of pages include: the ability to post pictures and videos (separate and apart from your personal profile pictures), create discussion forums, create an event and send out invitations, and get a page badge that you can place on your professional website. You can also add in extra applications that can, for example, connect your twitterfeed to your page.

Here is a video describing how to set up a Facebook fan page:

There are some drawbacks to fan pages though. One is that you lose the ability to IM your students over Facebook. This could be a good or bad thing. Sometimes teachers would rather not have students know when they are online (for example, grading papers at 2am) or be IMed with lots of questions the night before the exam. On the other hand, it would be nice to be able to IM during office hours with students. Some universities though, have other systems that can accommodate IM, including programs such as Elluminate. The second drawback is the ability to send a message to your students over Facebook. I can imagine a case where students asks a question on the page that requires a personal, private response. In such cases, you can always leave a comment, such as “This is something we need to discuss privately. Could you email me the specifics and I can get back to you?”

So, the next time a student asks you if you are on Facebook or sends you a “friend request”, you can safely point them to your fan page instead. You can have a meaningful student-teacher Facebook connection with a clear boundary.