BENEFITS OF ONLINE SOCIAL LEARNING

• (Relevant for GS Syllabus: Paper1- Social empowerment)
•  (Relevant for Sociology Syllabus: Paper 1- Sociology – The Discipline, Social Change in Modern Society & paper-2- Visions of Social Change in India)

• Dev Roy, Founder & Managing Director, Digital Aristotle One of the most prevalent formulae for learning and development is the 70-20-10 model, which elaborates the different ways people acquire their knowledge.
• The model entails that 70% of one’s learning is experiential, i.e. through completing tasks, resolving issues and regular practice while 20% is social, i.e. through interaction and observation of what others do.
• It is just the remaining 10%, which is acquired through traditional learning methods like schools, colleges and tuition centres. This suggests that the process of learning should be made as interactive as possible and the concept of social learning must be an integral part of any educational system. In simple terms, social learning means learning from and with others.
• In the current era of technological advancements, the ambit of social learning has widened up to great extent, including the integration of social elements in online or e-learning as well.
• The idea is to allow students play a more active role in their education and learn by sharing, questioning and clarifying their doubts through user-generated notes and study sets, doubt clearing forums and Artificial Intelligence-directed revisions and challenges.
• A number of studies conducted and data collated by us at Digital Aristotle show that social features such as forums and challenges are particularly popular among students as well as teachers.
• What most Edtech players do is replicate the traditional forms of teaching and learning while adding elements of interactivity. Where they lack is devising a system that thrives primarily on the concept of social learning.
• To fill this gap, we came up with Aristotle, an expanding social learning platform that connects students, tuition centres as well as schools. The foremost benefit of a well-formulated online social learning model turned out to be that students had at their disposal a massive bank of user-generated study material.
• Apart from it, the platform allowed immediate or instant resolution of doubts and queries. It’s about addressing the needs of the market. We also have the examples of Brainly, a pure Quora style question answering platform for students and one of the fastest-growing Edtech startups, and San Francisco-based company Quizlet, which has a similar functioning. These companies have realized the potential of online social learning and taking it a notch further to benefit a large chunk of the student community.
• Social learning further kills the monotony associated with online education. It allows educators as well as the students to create small discussion groups for an intimate subject or topic-centric conversation. While working in a group doesn’t let boredom crop up, a smaller size results in students being less apprehensive in asking questions that bother them. Furthermore, it creates opportunities for friendly competition.
• The key here, however, is setting the right rules for the online learners’ community. There is also a need for the allocation of space for informal interaction, employing the right tool to organize learning activities and taking advantage of gamification techniques that enable knowledge transfer.The benefits of online social learning do not end here. Another significant benefit of the system is it instils a culture of peer-to-peer support.
• When we interact with our peers, colleagues and mentors, a very important component of the same is seeking and giving advice and suggestions. What social learning platforms do is act as a digital bridge, allowing all participants to be creative in accordance with a defined goal.
• A good social learning platform addresses the challenge of teaching and assessing learning outcomes that are non-linear and deeply human. The information passed on through these platforms is more likely to be retained, for it expands the ambit of knowledge source beyond just teachers, professors or traditional learning resources.
• Moreover, you can access these platforms on the go. You do not have to be in a physically constrained set up to avail the benefits of social learning platforms.
• It has always been suggested that the emergence of digital learning would bring in new possibilities and methods of studying. The inclusion of new technologies has allowed the expansion of learning in more ways than one imagined not so long ago.
• However, as mentioned earlier, the challenge is to move over mere replication of traditional teaching and learning methods and adapt to the new ways of learning and expanding one’s knowledge such as social online learning.