During the autumn 2017 in a human-computer interaction course at Uppsala University, Sweden, the teachers implemented Facebook as an additional communication channel. The initiative was based on the teachers' previous experience of the use of social media in teaching contexts as well as earlier research. The communication that arose was analysed using a mixed methods approach and the result shows several trends regarding interaction patterns. For example, students were more active in commenting and responding to posts than teachers. There was also a difference in the type of messages that students and teachers posted, and patterns in the types of posts that received comments and reactions can be distinguished.
The relatively low number of posts makes it difficult to draw conclusions about how the medium affects roles that teachers and students take in the interaction; however, we found a tendency that students sometimes answer questions primarily formulated as posed to teachers. This has here been interpreted as the students taking on the traditional teacher role.