Twitter may still be a great place for student communities

X, previously known as Twitter, has a reputation for being a negative vitriolic space, but research shows it can be a great place for distance learners to build student identity and community.

Jane* hopes this time she’ll finally complete her degree after having to pull out of full-time university twice before. This time she’s studying with the Open University (OU), a large distance learning university based in the United Kingdom. She chose to use Twitter to reach out to other OU students and was delighted to find that: “I’m finally surrounded by people like me. I feel like Twitter is the first community where these people are all like me.”

It is recognised that distance learners are more at risk of dropping out, lack regular connection with fellow students and struggle to feel a sense of community. Could Twitter offer that much-needed connection and community for distance learners?

In 2021, I collected 45,000 tweets which used key OU hashtags (OUstudents and OpenUniversity) to see how OU students were communicating with each other. I used a mixture of Social Network Analysis, tweet content analysis and interviews to discover if students can use Twitter to build social presence and community with their peers.

Community and identity

The importance of community and connection shone through in my findings, being mentioned 90 times in just 10 interviews. Online communities offer students a supportive group with a shared emotional connection. Other students agreed with Jane’s point about meeting like-minded people, allowing distance learners to create a community.

Beatriz*, a part-time student who lives in a remote area, explained: “Twitter was definitely a place for connection and support; it’s a great digital space for human interaction, kindness and compassion.” She continues: “Twitter has been a lifeline, it keeps me connected to communities that enrich me.”

These quotes supported my Social Network Analysis which suggested that OU students demonstrate a tightly connected, clustered community structure on Twitter with multiple large groups, or clusters, without a key central user. There are also many smaller groups, but the analysis showed lots of regular connection between groups and a lack of hierarchy or exclusion in the groups.

Juggling multiple identities is another key issue for part-time distance learners. Beatriz chose to only present her academic self on Twitter, explaining: “You can have a persona that’s not mum or whatever; you can take on a scholarly persona.”

John* agrees, saying: “I’m proud of being an OU student; I’m happy to talk about the OU and my experiences on Twitter.” This expression of identity on social media is often referred to as social presence which is defined as the degree to which people present themselves as ‘real’ in an online community.

Positivity

My research analysed over 5,000 tweets from OU students looking for indicators of social presence using Garrison, Anderson and Archer’s Community of Inquiry model. The tweets included 1,686 examples of self-disclosure, with two-thirds of those being related to OU study and the remainder related to personal issues such as work or family life.

Students are clearly happy to share personal information on this public platform, showing that words can be key resources in how students present themselves and create their student identity via social media.

Despite the perceived levels of nastiness on Twitter, which appear to be growing since Elon Musk’s takeover in 2022, students use the platform’s affordances to ensure their feeds remain positive. Jane explained: “I’ve never been exposed to any nastiness on Twitter because I’ve got clear boundaries about what I will and won’t engage with.”

Other students outlined how they regularly block or unfollow people they don’t like as well as reporting fake accounts. These views are supported by my content analysis of tweets which showed overwhelmingly positive language used within the OU Twitter community.

For the social presence indicator of emotion, I coded separately for positive and negative emotion. With 2,282 coded instances of emotion, 89% of those were positive. This was alongside many other instances of compliments and appreciation. Students referred to this as the “OU bubble” on Twitter, suggesting a very positive and supportive community.

Intentional choices

Overall, my research has shown that distance learners find Twitter a useful space to create a community and build their social presence.

Students appear to self-regulate how they use the platform, who they interact with and how they present themselves in order to achieve their needs. For example, students were almost four times more likely to self-disclose study-related information than personal information. This supports Benjamin Kehrwald’s argument that students make intentional choices to demonstrate (or not) social presence.

However, it must be recognised that Twitter has undergone many changes since Elon Musk’s takeover, not least the name change to X. Growing levels of trolling and hate speech have persuaded some users to move to other platforms. This, unfortunately, leads to academic communities becoming fragmented, limiting their growth.

Another concern for academic researchers is the recent content restrictions. Downloading tweet information as I did for this study in 2021 is now only possible by paying high commercial rates. The shift away from public access to social media data can be considered a detrimental move for research and public scrutiny of social media.

*Names changed to preserve anonymity.

Olivia Kelly is an associate lecturer at the Open University (OU) in the United Kingdom, teaching on a variety of modules. She is awaiting her viva to complete her EdD on how OU students use Twitter (now X). She also leads the OU Social Media Scholarship Hub.