Enhancing learning outside the classroom with social media

Learning outside the classroom offers huge rewards for student engagement and cohort cohesion in higher education, but need not be as costly an endeavour, in terms of money and staff time, as it is frequently perceived. We discuss how integrating these field sessions with social media-based discussions and activities enhances engagement in learning in some cohorts and how this strategy can also work well when students are learning at a distance. We present a reflection of seven years of conducting social media-based activities in Biology and Geography programmes in the UK and Ireland outside the classroom via Twitter. We outline how social media use within pedagogies must account for different cohorts and student demographics during the design of such activities to ensure that the most suitable approach is taken. Finally, we reflect on future directions in this field given the broad range of social media platforms available and the changing nature of these online spaces.