Maximizing Student Engagement by integrating social media in assignments of an online course

Abstract

The Practical Courses in Engineering Education encourage higher-level thinking and creativity. Many of the practical courses' objectives are to develop end-to-end applications. Many tools exist to teach and engage practical courses online, but at the same time, it has several challenges. Making the students engaged after class hours is needed as practical courses require a lot of time to practice. To make the students genuinely participate and learn, we have involved gamification in the course and adopted a few social media platforms like GitHub, LinkedIn, YouTube, Kaggle, medium, etc., to submit the students' work as they are all public mediums. The course is offered to 124 participants of I B.Tech. Computer Science and Engineering stream students. By leveraging social media platforms and bringing in gamification in learning, the overall teaching-learning process gets highly benefited. The course-end survey results reported the students' positive attitudes and beliefs about social media use in education. Keywords—Student Engagement; practical course; online course; social media; Gamified Learning; GitHub; LinkedIn, Kaggle.