Making Meaningful Social Learning Experiences Through Technology

It is widely accepted that effective learning requires so much more than lectures and note taking. Longstanding learner theories argue that, in addition to actively participating in their learning on an individual level, participants must engage in a social learning environment that encourages three-way communication between the teacher, the learner, and their peers. Individualised teacher feedback is crucial, but collaboration with peers results in the process of critical reflection, planning, and synthesis being more explicit than if learners were to work alone (Benson, 2013). Despite the overwhelming evidence that learners thrive in social learning environments, the reality remains that educators often struggle to turn theory into practice both in the classroom and online. 

In the last few years, there have been more and more higher education teachers across the globe scrambling to move their lectures and seminars online to maintain their practice, with little time to stop and reflect on how to create successful social learning spaces. However, with the current recognition that online learning is now an integral part of the education system, more discussions are centred on how educators can reap the benefits of technology to meet their pedagogical needs so that online learning is just as effective, if not more effective, than face-to-face learning.

The key to designing effective social learning spaces is to completely reimagine the way we do things in traditional classrooms

The key to designing effective social learning spaces is to completely reimagine the way we do things in traditional classrooms and consider how technology can be used to our advantage to create these spaces. At insendi, we constantly strive to achieve this so that online learning is far from the solitary process it was previously. With an unparalleled range of Canvas-compatible activities to promote learner-teacher and learner-learner interactions, our learning design process is strongly focussed on making our courses active, engaging, and fostering a strong sense of community. One instance of this is our Wordcloud activity, which allows learners and their peers to enter words in response to a question or prompt. These responses appear instantly as a colourful graphic, with the most popular responses appearing in the biggest font. Participants find this activity an effective way to check learner knowledge and use peer feedback to support learning.

Our Canvas course creation tool makes it easy to feed back to learners and includes endorsement and voting features.

Whilst technology enables the creation of social learning spaces, it is teachers that continue to hold a critical role of fostering teacher-learner and learner-learner interactions. At insendi, this often includes teachers interacting with learners via multiple communication styles, responding to their queries, providing additional feedback, and fostering constructive peer engagement. We can see that it is technology that facilitates these important interactions between teachers and learners.

Going forward, there are many exciting conversations to be had surrounding how we can take advantage of technology to meet our pedagogical goal of creating effective social learning environments.