Since Facebook has grown into a multi-billion dollar international business it’s almost unbelievable to think that it all started in a college dorm room at Harvard University. Mark Zuckerberg is the mastermind behind Facebook. Although many people claim to have helped him start this company up and get it to where it is today, he has been the one constant in Facebook since it started.

  Harvard had a similar website set up where students within dorms could communicate with one another about their classes, etc. Zuckerberg (with or without insight from others) decided to take this to the next level by allowing all students across the campus to be able to access each others profiles, so the students could meet people outside of their classes and dorms. 

  This website expanded to other colleges nearby and the phenomenon eventually reached universities across the nation. Originally, you had to have an e-mail address from the university that you attended in order to set up a profile on Facebook at that university.

   If you went to Texas A&M you could not be ‘friends’ with someone at the University of Texas because the website would only allow you to engage with those at your own school. 

  As I remember it, Facebook eventually trickled into high schools, then went public across the United States and more recently has gone international. 

  If you want to read more about the good, the bad and the evil behind Facebook, I suggest picking up a copy of “The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook; A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal,” by Ben Mezrich.

  Now, not only are students using social media to socialize with one another, but the universities themselves are using them to engage their students. After all, their audience is the most absorbed population in social media. 

  While some universities use Facebook and Twitter to share information about their school, others use it to update their students, showcase students’ work, to broadcast events, and some are getting creative in their very own ways.

  In the spring of 2009, a history professor at University of Texas at Dallas decided to use Twitter to get her students to relate to one another easier. Monica Rankin’s class consisted of 90 students.   

  Once a class gets that large, generally just a few students tend to be involved with the class discussion, but introducing Twitter to the class allowed students to ‘tweet’ using their laptops or cell phones. Rankin also used an application called Tweetdeck and ran it through a projector and would have this live stream of conversations running during class.

  “I wanted to find a way to incorporate more student-centered learning techniques and involve the students more fully into the material. Twitter’s texting and internet options seemed to offer more students the opportunity to participate. Overall, I think the Twitter experiment was successful, primarily because it encouraged students to engage who otherwise would not,” said Rankin.

  Another popular source that more and more schools are starting to use is YouTube. Many universities have their own channel on this website, while even larger schools have multiple channels for the different departments within the school. 

  Take MIT for instance, on their channel, you can watch hundreds of videos on a wide variety of their courses. Anyone can subscribe to these channels and observe these classes from their own computer at no cost.

  Stanford University has been trying Facebook Office Hours. A professor will post that they will be hosting ‘office hours’ at a particular time. At this time, students can go on and watch what their instructor has to say. 

  When their video is complete, students can ask questions by leaving comments on the video. The professor will then record a second video addressing these questions. The university can see this is a success for them by the outpour of students that are participating.

  More jobs are being created for positions that were not available a few years ago. Think about it, 10 years ago people weren’t hired to run a company’s social media department. By embracing this new fad, universities are allowing students to possibly train for their next career.