Effective Use of Facebook’s Social Learning Group as a Course Management System for Undergraduate Engineering Courses

A Course Management System (CMS) is a software system designed to aid instructors in teaching, as well as, facilitate students in learning. Many commercial CMSs with different arrays of features exist, ranging from expensive university-wide implementations, to free platforms for individual faculty accounts. We seek to find inexpensive or free CMS platforms feasible for usage in undergraduate engineering courses in the Global South. With that objective, firstly, we explore different CMSs to identify key components of an effective CMS in the context of university courses operating with both traditional classroom meetups as well as virtual supplements. Secondly, we consider the free social networking service Facebook's new feature of Social Learning Group as a possible CMS and conduct semester-long experiments in several undergraduate courses. We provide results and share insights on the strengths and challenges of Facebook Group as a CMS and as an alternative to prohibitively costly platforms.