Social media and social networking tools offer new educational affordances and avenues for students to interact, that may alleviate the drop-out rate problem faced by distance education institutions (Rovai, 2003). However, we know little about distance students' expertise with social media or their interest in using them to learn individually or to collaborate with peers.To investigate these issues, an online questionnaire was distributed to students from four large Canadian distance education institutions. A systematic sampling procedure lead to 3462 completed questionnaires. The results show that students have diverse views and experiences, but they also show strong and significant age and gender differences in a variety of measures, as well as an important institution effect for interest in collaboration. Males and younger students score higher on almost all indicators, including cooperative preferences. In this article we review quantitative results from the survey from earlier work (authors, 2011) and present an analysis of the qualitative data gathered from open-ended questions in the survey. Answers to open-ended questions regarding the expectation and interest in using social software in their courses, show that students have positive expectations about interactions and course quality, but also concerns about technical, time, and efficiency issues The limits of the study and future developments and research questions are outlined.

In this paper we present a case study of a self-paced university course that was originally designed to support independent, self-paced study at distance. We developed a social media intervention, in design-based research terms, that allows these independent students to contribute archived content to enhance the course, to engage in discussions with other students and to share as little or as much personal information with each other as they wished. We describe the learning design for the intervention and present survey data of student and tutor perception of value and content analysis of the archived contributions. The results indicate that the intervention was positively received by tutors and by the majority (but not all) students and that the archive created by the students' contributions was adding value to the course. We conclude that the intervention was a modest, yet manageable example of a learning enhancement to a traditional cognitive-behavioral, course that has positive impact and potential with little negative impact on workload.