Abstract

The full-time international postgraduate taught programmes at the University of Chester Business School in the UK attract students from a range of different cultural backgrounds. This presents the teaching staff with a number of difficulties, and indeed due to the heterogeneity of the cohort's learning styles, it provides the students with some obstacles as well. Over the last few years, the researchers have noticed that many international students on the programmes find the dissertation stage (in particular the research methods element) of their postgraduate degree very challenging. The researchers wish to find ways of engaging the students in the whole dissertation process, through encouraging them to share ideas and work together on research methods training activities and dissertation related issues and problems. In this research the researchers are particularly interested in discovering if, and how, social networking tools -- especially Facebook (which all the students on the taught masters programmes use already) can be used to facilitate learning; thereby increasing the success rate on the dissertation stage of the programmes for full-time international postgraduate taught students. The results of this study demonstrate that Facebook can be an effective teaching tool for research methods. It can enhance the student’s learning experience and improve their understanging, resulting in an overall improvement in students’ dissertation grades.”