Improving Student Engagement in Higher Education: An Experiment with a Facebook Application in India

Due to their immense popularity, adapting Online Social Networks (OSNs) to improve student connectednessand engagement seems intuitive yet remains challenging. This paper presents a Facebook application designedto improve the quality and timeliness of information delivered to students through personalization and contextawareness.Sentiment-analysis for gauging the mood of the student community is also a key feature of theapplication providing insights to the management to make strategic or corrective interventions. A two-waycommunication channel is also provided between the students and faculty/management to improve the degree ofconnectedness. Finally, knowledge management capability is integrated with the application to improve generalknowledge levels of the students through delivery of short messages by faculty experts and from credible websources.Initial results from deploying this application at an institution of higher technical education in India arepresented.