Using social media and networks to increase learner engagement has been around for a long time. Many MOOCs also use the idea to make peer to peer interactions meaningful and make learning more engaging. However, there is the fact that a lot of such learning in practice just looks like responding to each other because there is a requirement to comment or peer review at least 3 others or 4 others. There is no real deeper meaningful engagement happening between peers.

This is even observable often between classes in online learning management systems. Can we solve this problem?

A TED talk by John Green in 2015 titled, “Paper Towns and why learning is awesome” talks about learning communities found online. As I stumbled across the video, I was really convinced by Mr. Green’s assertion that many of these learning communities online are very engaging and there are meaningful interactions taking place. However, unlike his main point which spoke about YouTube being the best such site, I found Reddit and Tumblr a lot more engaging and meaningful.

So I became a regular user of Reddit and wanted to see how it works. Here are a few replies on one of the most popular subreddits that is educational in nature. The site is www.reddit.com/explainlikeimfive and users ask questions which are then answered by other users. The subreddit has 19.4 million users.

One of the top posts of the previous month has this question asked: "Why can’t you spend dirty money like regular, untraceable cash? Why does it have to be put into a bank? In other words, why does the money have to be laundered? Couldn’t you just pay for everything using physical cash?" And it was labelled as an Economics question. The answer is very legitimate, but there are also funny and informal replies to the answer. These were the replies:

A reddit exchange where learning is taking place in an authentic environment with thousands of participants.

1. You can, as long as it's everyday people sums. You don't have to launder $2K. But if it's millions, people will get suspicious about how you can afford the stuff you buy, no matter how you buy it. And then you better have a plausible explanation, which is exactly what laundering aims to create.

2. (a reply to 1): If you don’t want to launder your money, that $2M you made illicitly is only good for gas and groceries.

3. (a reply to 2): That’s a lot of twinkies.

4. (a reply to 3): They're for my wife. She's pregnant.

For context, this question was upvoted by 21.2 thousand users, and the top answer by 17.4 thousand. 2 by 10.6 thousand, 3 by 6.5 thousand and 4 by 5.2 thousand. That is a lot of people engaging in this exchange.

More examples could even be found in highly academic subreddits such as r/askhistorians or r/askascientist. What could be the reason for this increased quality of engagement? There could be two possible reasons. One is the anonymity offered in the site where users are not afraid of cracking a joke and being worried if it is inappropriate and monitored by a teacher. But the second reason could be what is called a ‘convergence culture.’ Many users converge on a topic of their interest. So they will be more interested in engaging rather than being forced to. And the upvote and downvote system probably adds an added layer of quality control en masse.

Can we bring this level of engagement into the classroom? Can we design environments where students are free to talk about whatever topic they want to talk about and actually ask questions and engage with each other? That would be an interesting development if that happened.

Sources:

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mzsrmj/eli5_why_cant_you_spend_dirty_money_like_regular/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgDGlcxYrhQ

https://medium.com/@kflawson24/is-reddit-actually-educational-c3305eaf3a7e