#REALTALK: Facebook Confessions pages as a data resource for academic and student support services at universities

ABSTRACT

University students frequently use campus Facebook Confessions pages to engage with their peers about their university experiences. This article explores the utility of Confessions pages in providing novel data to aid the development of student services generally, and academic skills support in particular. Through a qualitative thematic analysis of five universities’ Facebook Confessions pages over five years, our research demonstrates that these platforms provide valuable insights. Confessions data complement traditional research and evaluation approaches and enable academic skills advisors to tailor their practices in response to students’ expressed needs. Additionally, these pages offer valuable insights into student learning and engagement styles, with the shift toward active and group pedagogical styles clearly evident. Yet overt interventions are likely to be unwelcome and counterproductive. We therefore suggest that while some limited participation can be beneficial, ultimately university staff should remain passive users of data, rather than active participants.

KEYWORDS:

• Facebook Confessions
• student experience
• academic skills
• student support
• social media
• academic learning advisors
• social networking sites

Acknowledgements

For insightful discussions about this research, and for creating such a collegial environment, we would like to thank our manager, Siri Barrett-Lennard, and all of the team. It should be noted that the positive feedback for the aforementioned teamwork workshops owes much to the dynamic teaching of our colleagues, Adam Nicol and Izzy Rossen, who developed and facilitate them. We also express our gratitude to the organisers and participants of the 2019 Association for Academic Language and Learning conference, at which we presented an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).