Research pick: Social student skills - "Introducing a capstone course on social networks"

Social networks provide a platform for political, social, business, and leisure activities and an opportunity for those with expertise in computer science to create novel businesses. New work published in the International Journal of Continuing Engineering Education and Life-Long Learning, looks at how a course might be developed for computer engineering students that will equip them with the skills to handle and manipulate the various platforms. Such a capstone course* might also be designed to empower them to generate new business opportunities, develop useful applications, or simply prepare for the job market in this arena.

Social networks have come to dominate the wide digital world that is often whimsically referred to as “cyberspace”. Billions of people use at least one social network in their day-to-day lives. Indeed, the author of the current paper, Mohammad Fraiwan of the Department of Computer Engineering, Jordan University of Science and Technology, writes that there are well over three billion uses of social networks. That figure is growing all the time it seems and given that the world population is fast approaching 8 billion that represents a substantial proportion. With traditional and online media already utilizing social networks as a source of “news” and “comment”, there are many ways in which a knowledgeable expert in this realm might create and exploit business opportunities.

Fraiwan describes and demonstrates the successes of a capstone course for undergraduate students that not only exposes these students to the plethora of social networks, but also makes it possible for them to collect and analyse data from these networks and propose useful applications. He points out that while computer engineering is intrinsically tied to studying and solving real-life problems, many courses are embedded in a staid and out-moded didactic tradition.

There is, therefore, a growing and pressing need for the student of today to be tutored and guided in practical emerging fields to ready them for the job market they will face when they graduate. Fundamentally, a new style of course that brings real-life problems into the classroom and guides the students in how to solve those problems will prepare them to be problem solvers in the outside world in a way that more conventional courses cannot.

Fraiwan, M. (2021) ‘Introducing a capstone course on social networks’, Int. J. Continuing Engineering Education and Life-Long Learning, Vol. 31, No. 4, pp.485–500.

* A capstone course is usually defined as a period of study and a project undertaken towards the end of a larger period of education to “cap” off the work that has been built up to that point, analogous to the final stones or brocks laid atop a wall, the capstones.