The questionnaire was filled in by 270 first-year students (143 BSc and 127 MSc students). Fifty eight percent of these students own a smartphone; last year that figure stood at 35 percent. Most students have a Samsung telephone. Students do a lot of facebooking and tweeting. And it can be related to their studies, say 55 percent of the first-years. Course-mates exchange information and knowledge and teachers of Social Psychology and Applied Communication make use of Facebook to answer students’ questions. Students already make regular use of Wageningen UR’s internet services. They consult EDUweb to check their course documents, for instance (51 percent), and the timetable (46 percent). But they are not very satisfied with it. The sites are slow, not user-friendly or the layout of the pages is not suitable for smartphones. In August this year the university launched an app to make Blackboard accessible to students with a smartphone.
Uni survey: 90 percent of students on Facebook
Almost all Wageningen UR first-year BSc and MSc students are on Facebook, and half of them check their pages several times a day. These facts have come out of a university survey of social media use among its students.