Music Journalist
I worked with the Developer Relations Team which is housed inside a larger marketing group within the company working to support developers consuming the Facebook API. At this point I was working on a meaningful engagement modol which would measure social connectedness in online groups. This is one of the high-level North Stars of the larger platform data science initiative so I worked with the Data Science Group within the Platform sector of the company to read some of their findings and understand what meaningful engagement meant.
I helped redefine meaningful engagement in online groups by posting targeted content in one specific group and traveling to the physical location of the event and speaking with the developers in person. This in person project increased meaningful engagement in one online facebook group and writing about it helped the data science group improve the meaningful engagement model with targeted content.
Read About The Research Study Here
Now that students are locked inside and forced to learn online, designing engaging online communities is more important than ever. In this article, I want to share what I learned helping to build a few online communities for international student developers using Facebook groups. I want to focus on the design of the group, specifically what information should be included, why this information is important, and how to ensure that all of the group members are able to engage with the material in a meaningful way. I am going to assume that you have done all of the leg work to get your students into a group of some sort and you can use this post to think through the different ways that students engage with the content available in the group.
Passive Learners
In online groups, some students choose not to create content like posts or messages but instead prefer to read the content which is already there. They spend a significant amount of time clicking on links provided, watching videos and reading other students’ responses to the content providing reactions to the content via, likes or reshares. For passive learners, it is important to ensure there is a learning path available. They need to understand the content sequentially and be able to visually map out where they are going in terms of learning objectives and what they mean. In learning groups, it is typically not enough to have only the content by the instructor in the group, you need other learners or leaders to provide text explanations of why the content is useful or important for the passive learner to engage with. Open-ended content assignments might be the most useful for learners of this style given the requirement that they respond to a prompt of some sort. It could also be useful to post content for all students and assign paired assignments where students answer a few questions and then the assignment involves the student sharing their partners’ responses.
Active Learners
If there is content already posted in the group, these learners are going to engage with the content by posting their thoughts about the content publically and responding to their peers’ posts. Active learners demonstrate one way to engage with content, but it is important that their contributions to the learning environment to not overshadow the other students. If participation points are given to students or groups just based on the number of posts comments or shares, you will find that some groups are trending well according to the data only because an active online learner is boosting the analytics in the group. While the engagement of one over-enthusiastic student is not negative it is also not reflective of the engagement of the group as a whole or even the learning happening in the community.
Discussion
While the content creators in each group (instructors) are familiar with the ideas being presented, the students in the group are being presented with new ideas they are encountering for the first time. Traditional Socratic methods of instruction in public schools do an awful job of providing personalized learning solutions which I attribute to the poor learning outcomes, but online learning groups also leave a lot of students cut and dry given their inability to creating meaningful interactions between all members of the group. For students to learn new information it is important for them to have meaningful interactions with their peers about the content because it is one of the only ways for students to contextualize the information. In online learning groups, facilitators can encourage meaningful dialog between group members by creating prompts that all students are required to respond to by a specific time. Students should also be required to respond to other students’ posts, and providing an opinion or follow up question to the post.
Time
If the learning group is able to build some sort of community, as time goes on the interactions between the group members should improve. The quality of posts should improve and different learning styles might start to mesh. Active learners whose ideas have been challenged more frequently might become more passive and comment more than they post or react more than they post. Passive learners might start to share resources that they have been engaging with elsewhere and others in the group find meaningful.
Study Strategies
While the online group might contain all of the ideas which students are tasked with exploring and contextualizing it is critical that students are equipped with good study skills to complement that material. Without an independent strategy to sit with the material and contextualize it, students will not be able to effectively engage with other group members because they lack a general understanding of the material and what it sought out to teach. The stagnant content on the platforms serves as a skeleton that students can refer back to but as the class progresses it is important that students can identify aspects of the curriculum which are important and form opinions about that content. Pre-lecture and post-lecture posts are one way to moderate this engagement in an online setting.
For example, in a group devoted to careers in data the first post can ask students why they decided to join the group?
Welcome to the summer 2020 virtual inernship on careers in data. What motivated you to join this group and what career paths are you familiar with in this sector? Post a link to a job in the data field and comment on a post describing a job you haven’t heard of. This post is general enough that without any background each student should be able to reply to the post and go through an exercise on searching and exploring content outside of the group to relay that information back to the group. After a lesson exploring some of the careers in the field, students should be able to answer certain questions about the content presented. It is easy for a content moderator to place all of the learning in a one-off assignment but that would not be a good example of content moderation and would halt a lot of student engagement in the online group. Posting the learning objective questions as a series of posts in the unit encouraging students to comment on the post would enable students to think about what they learned and chat about it with other students. A group leader could start by tagging a particular student in the group and asking a targeted question about the content starting a series on responses and have each student tag another student for a response.
Before and after each learning session, students should come in with questions that the instructor should be aware of and hopefully get those questions answered during the online time together. After a learning session, students should walk away with new questions with they should have the skills to research on their own. In my own experience as an online learner, it is really important for me to use my notepad effectively. Writing down topics that I am unfamiliar with and writing down questions that I need to get more clarification on are important skills that have helped me level up and should be encouraged for online learning.
Office Hours
Zoom calls or google hangouts are going to be the main source of office hours, but students need to be encouraged to use them because most do not understand what they are or how they can be useful. Short video clips welcoming students to the office hour and giving them examples of topics that could be discussed during the office hour are useful posts to create around the time of the discussion, maybe an hour or two before the session starts. Reminding students to create a calendar invite for the event and possibly add their questions to it would be a useful task as well.
Other Interesting Areas To take into account
What is it like to be a developer in the developing world?
The infrastructure problems of the program were clear to me at this point, but I was not sure what it was like to be a developer in a developing country and I had a hypothesis that the needs of a developer in a developing country were not the same as the needs of a developer in America. I would frequently read over posts and comments in the most and least active (in terms of online active engagement) groups and noticed the quality of the posts was pretty poor. I started to think about how developers in a developing community could have meaningful events with low quality online content. I hypothesizes that if the content in the online group were of high quality then the developers in the group would spend a lot more time consuming that content and the engagement in the groups would go up. I also assumed that there was a lack of context on the part of the developers in the group on how to use the online group to get their needs met.