Social Media Connecting Campus Recreation

Social Media Connecting Campus Recreation

To better connect with your students, you want to interact with them on their own terms. You want to put your message in front of them in a comfortable and relatable way. What better way to do so than by interacting with them through the same means as they already engage in daily, via social media.

Sociocultural perspective suggests that cognitive growth is influenced by society and culture, and not performed in isolation. Not surprising then is the overwhelming use of social networking sites in four-year colleges. According to Barnes and Lescault, “100% of 456 four-year accredited U.S. institutions reported using some form of social media, with Facebook (used by 98%) and Twitter (used by 84%).”(1) The goal of campus recreation is to give students an outlet to further their health and wellness and the opportunity to interact through sport. In campus recreation we are seeing these interactions from university and students begin to reshape how we can better meet these goals.

Here at Tarleton we have already experienced student driven changes in our campus recreation facility and in our intramural/club sports programs. We asked our students what sports they would like to see us add to our program and subsequently added men’s and women’s club soccer as well as men’s lacrosse.

Campuses are also beginning to interact with one another and share programming information. The use of an online outlet through NIRSA.net is also helping to keep campuses connected and up to date with what is currently happening in campus recreation nation wide. Being that NIRSA is a nationwide organization, campuses on the west coast are beginning to adopt what schools on the east coast are doing and vice versa.

A connected nation of collegiate recreation facilities and programs is highly beneficial for these programs and the students who use them. Being able to share information about which programs work and which don’t, how schools handle certain situations, and how and why certain facilities attain the equipment they have gives the student the best possible opportunity to explore campus recreation enjoyably.

References:

1Barnes, D., & Lescault, A. (2016). Social Media Adoption Soars as Higher-Ed Experiments and Reevaluates Its Use of New Communications Tools, According to New Research Study. PRWeb. Retrieved 29 January 2016, from http://www.prweb.com/releases/SocialMedia/Higher-Ed2011/prweb8668892.htm