LIS Curriculum Design: Collaborative Partnerships of Various Stakeholders in Social Media

Abstract

Social media has been widely used as a platform in education particularly in teaching and learning. This is enthused by the available features in social media platform that enable close connections between students to students and students to teachers through online discussion, feedbacks, comments and sharing information. This is supported by a unique characteristic of millennial learners who value interactivity through immediate two-way communication and anticipate a prompt information retrieval since they were grown up with information on their fingertips mainly being able to Google anything. This paper however is not going to address how social media is being used in teaching and learning process but to report and share our experiences in using social media as a tool when designing our curriculum for Master of Library and Information Science particularly in University of Malaya. Therefore this paper presents how social media (such as Facebook and Twitter) is being used as a platform to support collaboration among various stakeholders involves in the curriculum design as we conducted our market survey; getting feedback from industries, current students and alumni; tracer study and later marketing our program. This paper would be useful to other LIS schools to learn from our experiences in developing curriculum taking advantages of social media platform to gather information from geographically disperse stakeholders.