“Teaching communication skills, theory, and practice with LinkedIn: A project-based assignment approach to analyzing how the professional platform should and should not be used by undergraduates”

LinkedIn has transformed many aspects of professional networking, hiring, and sharing information in a communication format that is based in the world of social media formats. Students are often told by professors, academic advisors, and career service staff, to get a profile built and be on it so that they can “network” and do related communication tasks in the professional realm. The issue that I have discovered from many discussions with students in the past, is they have no idea how to do any of those things, or what it even means. They also do not understand what the point of LinkedIn is, and what they really should or should not be doing on it. Often, they have posted things that should never be shared in such a setting, but they are not even aware of this. To combat this lack of understanding, and to improve their usage of the tool, I wanted to go further than just explain what LinkedIn is. I went deeper with the platform, and created an assignment that utilized an experiential learning approach, which I embedded in my Organizational Behavior classes. The focus of the project was each student had to build a profile (or improve their current one), and then spend eight weeks following the communication activity of their network and general feeds. They also had to start posting their own material and assess how the community engaged with it. They had to create a weekly journal that served as a portfolio of illustrating their work, and write about two main things: 1) What is everyone else doing in here, and how appropriate is it? And 2) What am I trying to do in here, and is it working or not? The purpose of my session is to illustrate how this assignment was organized, administered, and the benefits it gave students upon reflection, so that attendees can identify what takeaways they can gather from it for their own courses.