School University Consortium to Enhance General Certificate Student’s Prospective and Academic Performance in Palestine

Abstract

This paper introduces a conceptual platform for bringing students and teachers together in a social media consortium. The results extracted from the questionnaire used in this paper exhibits that the majority of the students support and are eager to see this idea live and willing to play an active role and show full commitment. This consortium encompasses students and teachers from both school and university. This platform prepares the students, fosters and enables them to a smooth transition from school to university, as well as improving the students’ communication skills and academic performance by using mentoring, tutoring and coaching techniques. As a case study of social media, Facebook was used as a communication and interactive tool amongst group members. The theme behind this platform is to construct academic group from final year school students with first year university students to exchange experience and transfer knowledge. This group has school teachers as well as university teachers. Each group has a mentor, coach and tutor. Each of them will play a specific role throughout the group, which will be highlighted in this paper. The outcomes were useful and interesting for students, their parents and teachers involved. It was a great experiment and recommended to widen it to involve more students and teachers.