Harnessing Facebook for Student Engagement in Accounting Education: Guiding Principles for Accounting Students and Educators

This paper proposes principles to guide accounting students' and accounting educators' use of Facebook as an educational resource to engage students with their learning. A body of cross-disciplinary research has investigated potential applications of Facebook to invigorate student engagement. Generic guidelines for educators who are contemplating integrating Facebook into pedagogical practice are a recent addition to this research. However, there is a lack of disciplinary-specific guidelines to inform both accounting educators' and accounting students' use of Facebook as a learning resource. Indeed, Facebook's pedagogical affordances are a generally overlooked field of enquiry in accounting education research. The principles proposed in the paper are informed by the literature on Facebook and student engagement, and the concept of digital citizenship, which illuminates the importance of the responsible and professional use of Facebook by accounting students and the development of online practices and behaviours that enhance students' appeal to the accounting profession.