About Course
Introduction to online communication
Education has crossed the borders of your organisation, gone global and time and place are becoming more and more irrelevant. Institutions of higher education are becoming international nodes of knowledge of students, researchers and teachers. A place to meet and interact, not necessarily in real life, but also online and on social media.
The higher education sector has acknowledged the fact that online communication plays an integral role in the impact of both the institution and the members of its community. Students, researchers, teachers and staff play a key role in the perception of science, education and everything else that happens at higher education institutions.
As a scientist, you play a pivotal role in connecting science with society. You are the ambassador of your scientific area of expertise and you are the one that can have a scientific impact on society. Online communication will help you to have an online scientific impact.
Online communication
Online communication consists of three aspects: Listening (or monitoring), interaction and content creation. These three aspects are tied together and influence each other:
- When you know what is being discussed about you and your research, you can easily assess whether you need to interact in a given situation.
- Relevant interaction can lead to different approaches to your content creation.
- Your content and your interactions can lead to rethinking your listening process.
- When you create content you can expect interactions from others, and it is a good starting point for interaction with others.
By organizing and implementing the listening, interaction and content creation process in a balanced and relevant way, the quality of your online communication will increase while the time and effort decrease.
In this introduction to online communication, we will dive into these three aspects, but before we do that, we will go through the terminology we use in this course.