What I’ve Learned About Building Community-Driven Learning Experiences
Learning communities align with our human nature.
We have a basic need to connect with others, collaborate, and belong to the communities that we live in. Our environment influences the way we behave. Thus, why don’t we leverage our human nature to design learning experiences? Why should we have the students only listen and follow what the instructors say? Let the students collaborate with one another and articulate their thinking and understanding with one another.
Learning and knowledge are contextual. Learning communities allow for various possible answers to the same question/subject matter.
The pursuit of a learning community comes from our belief that knowledge shouldn’t be centered around a single person, the instructor. School and life have different cultures; thus, things we learn in school might not be the same as how it works in real life. Thus, the relevance of knowledge depends on how each student can and chooses to apply it to their own situations. Learning communities allows for multiple answers and multiple possibilities to take place. Each student gets to see how his or her peers think and process the information shared. Learning how other people perceives knowledge and makes their own (learning) decisions sharpen our own understanding and decision-making processes.
Learning communities narrow the bridge between theory and application in the learning process.
We all learn by doing. When the learning experience is teacher-centered, we focus on the HOW of the instructor which we expect students will model and achieve the desired goals. However, each student is situated in a different context, a different culture and thus they might have to tweak the HOW of the instructor a bit to fit their situation. In the classroom environment, we’re trying to teach things that the students can use outside of class, while this is not always the case in practice. Learning communities allows students a space to share whether they can apply the learning to their own lives, how they do it and share the processes with one another. From there, students give and take feedback to enhance their own processes.
A learning community invites everyone to be a part of the learning experience and to participate in the curation of shared knowledge and experiences.
Why are we gathering in this course? As the learning hosts, we should ask ourselves what we want to achieve when we bring together a group of learners from all over the place for a learning experience.
Is it just for knowledge? Is it just for networking? Is it both?
I find it’s important to set a clear purpose for the course and communicate it clearly with the students.
<aside> 💡 For example, for Writing on the Net, the purpose of this course is to help each student achieve their blogging goals and curate a community of Vietnamese bloggers who support each other in the writing and publishing process.
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How does a clear purpose come to alive - you might ask? Here are some of the concepts I find useful to think about when building learning communities
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When I design “HCH”, I also have to set a clear purpose on why we gather live for 90 minutes or 2 hours, and why we set up asynchronous learning environments i.e. Discord, Gather, Notion. What do we want to accomplish? What’s unique about the live class environment that sets itself apart from the asynchronous environment?
Live class is the time when the students have access to everyone from students to instructors, where we commit to staying focused and participating for the designated period of time. Thus, the purpose shouldn’t be for the instructor to take all the stage or the students to work individually but a combination of the two. Live interaction is the time for us to come together to clarify lingering thoughts and questions, share experiences and learnings and above all, in my opinion, to build human connections.
What do we mean by the culture of the course?
The culture emerges from the leaders of the course and leaders of the organization. The smallest gestures come from the individuals from above.
We have discussed above that learning should be a social event. Environment influences our learning. People learn through observing others and through interacting with each other’s thoughts. After we have established the purpose of the course, we should connect it with the environment, and the culture that would help bring to life the purpose. What are the ground rules we will all agree with? What is the relationship between the learning hosts and participants? What’s the “vibe” we want to co-create?
<aside> 💡 For example, for Writing on the Net, the culture of the course is open, collaborative, and output-oriented. The role of the learning hosts is to ensure that this culture shines through in every interaction the students have with one another inside live classes or course group chats.
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Gathering with purpose starts with excluding with purpose. - The Art of Gathering
Filtering out fit students helps maximize the group’s learning experience and increase their completion rate. Saying “it’s not for you” for students whose purposes don’t align with the course’s shows the ability to respect the students enough that we are not going to waste their time and shows respect for those we seek to serve.
What should we, as learning hosts, consider during the admission process?
<aside> 💡 For example, students who fit the most with our courses are high school and undergraduate students. They have the need and time available for engaging in the community rather than just stopping by to receive content.
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What are important tasks students will be working on in order to reach desired outcomes of the course? Keep in mind that we should make the learning tasks more contextual, more grounded in the culture/lifestyles/current situation of the students so students can use what they learn in the course in their daily lives.
<aside> 💡 For example, in Writing on the Net, the learning tasks might involve three main areas: (1) collect ideas, (2) write and rewrite, (3) publish work in order to provide students with tools/direction ****to improve their blogging. The learning tasks are made contextual by providing a space for students to hone their writing craft through exploring topics/causes that they care about, and that they believe are worth sharing.
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How do we make it more contextual you might ask? Read on!
Understand the context and needs of each student
I think the best way to understand the context and needs of students is to talk to them 1 on 1. Consider asking them why they sign up for the course, what their background is and how this course fits into their life at the moment. Understanding the stage of life that they are in and the pain point that they experience can help us gather data to make better generalizable data points about students when we scale.
<aside> 💡 For example, the more that we do this, the more we can generalize that students at the beginning of high school stage will need X; students who are transitioning to college will need X; students who are taking the time off school will need X; students who are transitioning to the workforce will need X.
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Link the learning tasks with the purpose and culture of a learning community
Learning communities kill two birds with one stone. Students obtain new knowledge by modeling the instructors and have opportunities to apply it to their lives, discuss with peers, reflect and get feedback from one another. Learning communities allows for multiple answers and multiple possibilities to take place. Each student gets to see how his or her peers think and process the information shared.
For each of the learning tasks, we want to ensure:
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How do we design learning tasks that are community-driven?
When we think of collaborative learning tasks, what do we mean and how do we decide what tasks students should collaborate on and what tasks they should do on their own?
Will the future of learning be learning communities? I think this is a possibility given various ways people can gain information online and given the constantly changing nature of platforms. As more people have the power to learn and form their own opinions/understandings, knowledge will be shared among many people. The point of learning is no longer to teach people how to memorize and take tests but to help each other look up information online, analyze the information and form their own understandings.
When anyone can access any information at any point in time, we will move from one person having access to information to one person having access to information earlier or later than the other.
Thus, it leads me to a hypothesis that in order for learning communities to successfully run, there need to be multiple layers of support instead of the binary traditional learning model that includes an instructor and many students as we all probably had experienced in the past.
<aside> 💡 Each learning community needs learning hosts which consist of various roles.
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Facilitators: If a course is a [digital learning] city and the live classes aka touch points with the instructor are the town halls/city halls, a significant chunk of the success of that city’s community lies in the interactions and conversations people have day to day as they walk through this city. What kinds of conversations do we want to overhear? What kinds of conversations would spark our interest? What kinds of discussions/questions do we want to bring to city halls? Facilitators are sporadic touch points that consistently, throughout the duration of the course, bring students together, and re-spark their interest when it’s gone.
A city speaks to you mostly by accident — in things you see through windows, in conversations you overhear. The conversations you overhear tell you what sort of people you're among. - Paul Graham
As I reflect on my summer of 2022, I have learned so much about the meaning of a learning community. As someone who would rather learn on my own, I am now convinced having a strong learning community is beneficial in the long run. Learning community doesn’t mean we always have to learn side by side and see each other face to face. It means having a support network always available to help each person grow on their own journey ahead.
I want to thank my team, the instructors, and the students for your love for learning and for creating a more supportive, effective learning environment. I don’t really know where my project is gonna go but I know I do not regret every bit of my summer learning, thinking, and building learning communities.
This is an ongoing writing piece. I will update and give examples as I learn and build more!
Some of the people I follow and resources I read in this space
Things I am reading right now