Have you thought of LinkedIn as your teaching resource?

How LinkedIn can be a pedagogical treasure trove, an instrument of gratitude, and a teaching blog

Tatiana Andreeva - Wed 12 Feb 2025 16:00 (updated Sun 9 Feb 2025 13:45)

[Guest post by CYGNA member Tatiana Andreeva]

I know many academics who are hesitant about LinkedIn. Some try to stay away from it as they fear social media steals their time – the resource most of us are short of. Others feel uncomfortable about the self-promotion spirit of LinkedIn or suffer from an impostor syndrome and think they don’t have interesting content to share regularly. I fully understand these concerns. Yet I think that academics can benefit from LinkedIn beyond self-promotion – for example, by using it as a teaching resource. Have you thought of it this way? Here are three ways I use LinkedIn for my teaching.

LinkedIn is full of teaching ideas

I follow a number of practitioners and researchers interested in the topics I teach. They regularly post about some situations that happened to them at work; or repost relevant mass media articles with their reactions or reflections. These materials inform and inspire my teaching.

Sometimes I use these examples in-class to illustrate the concepts I want to explain and to discuss with students how to deal with such situations. For example, here is a recent case that speaks to diversity, inclusion and leadership topics – and my ideas of how to use it in teaching. Note that it will fit not only to a class that focuses on these very topics. It will also work well for classes on evidence-based management, organisational diagnostics or qualitative research methods. Another example is this post - a great illustration to use if you teach customer experience, user experience or product design.

Sometimes, I even design a full learning activity for my students, inspired by those LinkedIn prompts. My recent favourite is this one – I used this story to design an exercise to teach students how to apply basic principles of evidence-based management. Students’ feedback says they really liked the activity, as it was relatable and fun (and yet allowed me to tap on serious learning outcomes). Here is another example – while written by someone not in academia and not labelled as such, it is an almost ready exercise to teach about gender bias. The moment I changed my lenses to see LinkedIn as a source of teaching ideas, I see them all the time now.

What I find particularly helpful in sourcing these teaching examples from LinkedIn rather than just reading the newspapers, is that sometimes I see a story in the news that I think is relevant for my class, but I’m hesitant on what is the best angle to introduce it to my students. And then I read LinkedIn comments to the story, see different perspectives, including those that are very different from my own – and get an idea. Often, it’s the comments that I am surprised about or strongly disagree with that spark my ideas on how to discuss this issue in class and help me to articulate more clearly my own perspective on it. In addition, LinkedIn comments and reflections to the real-life stories provide me with examples of how different practitioners may react to the same issue, and it is often an interesting point in itself to discuss with my students.

LinkedIn to say “thank you” for teaching resources and ideas

Another important way how I use my LinkedIn in teaching context is to express my gratitude to other educators who informed my teaching. Indeed, as researchers we treasure so much when our publication is cited by others - it gives us an idea if it is useful for someone. Citations are often used as a measure of our work’s impact. We can thank those who informed our research by citing their work, or – if they provided informal advice and feedback on the paper – by mentioning them in the “Acknowledgements” section.

However, the story is very different for teaching-related resources and advice. When we use ideas from someone’s publication to design our class, it’s the most direct indicator of the impact of their work. Yet, authors of such teaching publications – if it’s not a textbook that was recommended to all students - rarely know that their work is being used in classroom, because there is no way to monitor it. Maybe it’s one of the reasons such publications are not particularly valued in many systems that outline criteria for academic career progression. Similarly, when our colleagues generously share their teaching ideas or unpublished resources with us, we don’t have an established way to publicly acknowledge their help and thank them. I think it’s not fair but it’s our current reality - at least, in business schools.

So I use LinkedIn to spotlight the authors of the teaching resources that I use in my class and colleagues who informally shared with me their teaching tips or materials - to give them visibility they deserve, and to signal to them that their teaching expertise is making an impact. This is my way to thank them for being generous in sharing their teaching ideas, and spending their time to publish these, especially in the context when this work is not encouraged much. And who knows, maybe one day my “thank you” post can help them to support their promotion application? I’d be delighted.

LinkedIn as your teaching blog

The third way how we can use LinkedIn in connection to our teaching practice is to share our own teaching ideas and resources. Why LinkedIn? First, turning our ideas into a teaching-focused publication requires a lot of effort and time. Many of us, especially those working in institutions where such publications are not valued, would not be interested to invest time in. LinkedIn is a much less resource-intensive way to share your teaching ideas or tips.

Second, not every teaching insight or idea we have is “big” enough to warrant a proper full paper. However, it still might be interesting and useful for others – and a short LinkedIn post might be just right for it. In sum, you can use LinkedIn as a teaching blog. This way you can amplify your voice as a teacher and contribute to giving our teaching work the visibility it deserves. Indeed, academia was created for teaching, right?

Your teaching-related posts do not have to be long and formally labelled as “pedagogic” ones – you can make them relatable and useful for non-educator audiences as well. For example, I curated a list of podcasts for my students, and then thought - maybe other educators - or practitioners - might be interested in them? So I started sharing my podcast recommendations on LinkedIn. Another example - you may not realise, but this post is a brief teaching note for the exercise I developed for my Evidence-Based Management class. This one refers to the activity I use to teach about hidden biases and a Ted talk I recommend to my students.

In sum

To conclude, we can benefit from social media if we use them strategically – that is, have a clear idea of why we use a specific social media, and then adjust how we use it in line with our purpose. I hope my ideas may make you revisit why and how - as an educator - you may want to use LinkedIn, and be strategic in your choices.

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Tatiana Andreeva is Associate Professor in Management and Organizational Behavior at the School of Business at the Maynooth University, Ireland. She served as a Research Director for the School 2018-2023. Her research addresses the challenges of managing knowledge in organizations. For example, Tatiana seeks to understand why people share or hide knowledge (and why they don’t), and what managers can do to facilitate (or prevent) these behaviours. Her ongoing research projects examine the effects of the shift to hybrid work on knowledge sharing and collaboration in organisations – what challenges companies face and how to address them. Tatiana is also interested in gender aspects of knowledge behaviours. Tatiana teaches a range of organisational behaviour, knowledge management, evidence-based management, and research methods topics, including a PhD course on “Research problems, literature reviews and theory building in business and management research”.

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