Why User Generated Content and Education are a Perfect Match

Recently, our team at Edily was reflecting on a post by Andreessen Horowitz on the future of Edtech. While there’s a lot to unpack in that article, one of the bets that we’re making is that the education space will continue to evolve to address the inequities within individual school systems; new platforms will be further aided by technology and built to both supplement traditional classrooms as well as to stand on their own merit. The general procession of the “three phases of online learning in the U.S.” (image below) paints a picture moving closer and closer to building a replacement for school. However we believe that the next phase should be interpreted as one of creating community online with education as a focus, which must be informed by the top social and media platforms today — Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and of course the fastest app to ever reach a billion downloads, TikTok.

We at Edily believe that trends in education, media, entertainment, and social technologies all point to higher levels of user involvement in co-creating learning experiences for each other. While this introduces issues centered around trust, legitimacy of information, and quality of content, just as Airbnb commoditized trust by unbundling housing rental listings from craigslist, the technology, moderation, and structure of a platform like Edily for learning will be what enables student and teacher trust in the information on the platform. The following are a few of the reasons why user-generated content specifically will be a huge leap forward for Edtech.

Interactivity

User generated content, especially content like the remixable videos that exist on TikTok, offer an opportunity for users to interact with each other, riff off each other’s best ideas, and use other people’s creativity as a base for further iterative creation. The learning community has always been fully immersed in the world of interactive education within the structure of schools, but online platforms have had inconsistent success with building community, commentary, and interaction. User-generated content offers a unique opportunity to re-engage a community separated from physical schooling by the pandemic because it is meant to be interacted with; through comments, rebuttal, remixing, and more, many-to-many content will always beat one-to-many content for creating community that leads to interactivity.

Culture of Shared Success

Educators have long shared success with other educators. For some, that means showing a video a peer created to their classroom to help students visualize a topic. For others, it has meant sharing fun lesson ideas or cool experiments on Pinterest. And for others, teacherspayteachers.com has been a lifesaver, both from the perspective of creators of great lesson material who have been able to supplement their income or create an entire business out of the lessons they provide to others, as well as from the perspective of the teacher who just needs a head start getting through to kids.

Modularity of Learning

Ask any teacher and they’ll tell you that the last thing an educator should do for today’s high schoolers is go into “hour long lecture mode.” Teens today tell us that lessons should be funny, relatable, and broken up with interactive checks on how the learning process is going. Yet far too many lessons on YouTube or Coursera aren’t broken out into the individual components of learning. Creating a lesson plan is hard enough as it is, but fitting it into an arbitrary time window determined by the amount of time between class periods doesn’t make sense. The fact that user generated content, when guided with a lesson framework, can be broken down into modules of appropriate length and can focus on concept overviews before diving into individual components gives the proper structure for deep learning. This modularity isn’t a new idea (see Wayne Hodgin’s 2006 thoughts on Learning Objects) but the scalability of hundreds of amazing teachers enabling content, with the right enablement, can help bring it to life.

Content Network Effects

Ultimately education’s culture of sharing success and need for interactivity along with user-generated content’s modularity of content are some of the most powerful pieces that unlock and enable the idea of content network effects for education platforms. Content network effects were one of the key pieces that powered TikTok to 1 Billion users faster than any app before it. What are content network effects? They represent the increasing value of a platform as more content comes to that platform. But this is not just because more content means a higher likelihood that the user finds something entertaining, educational, interesting, etc. In TikTok’s case, the more content there is on the platform, the less creators have to start from scratch to create something new. In education where time is a teacher’s most valued commodity, every barrier removed to creating a new lesson is a step in a powerful direction.

Evolving Media Preferences

Gen Z is already accomplishing amazing things. From creating social movements that provide commentary on the state of startup culture to building cool companies like HAGS that meet the specific needs of their generation’s experience with distance learning. But as the first true digital natives – kids who don’t know what life was like without instant internet access from anywhere or before self-made celebrities commanded millions of eyeballs – Gen Z is also teaching us what the future of media will look like. The kinds of media that do well with Gen Z are already shaping the world, so catering to those media preferences will be critical to winning broad audiences in the future. Some of the trends to watch:

• Mobile-first – Like a rousing rendition of “anything you can do, I can do better,” mobile applications have shown that they are replacing traditional computers in many ways, and that is especially true with Gen Z.
• Community-driven – From Fortnite to TikTok, the platforms that do best today are those that understand and facilitate their communities.
• Creator-driven – If you ask Lego (who asked “The Harris Poll” to survey kids about what they want to be when they grow up), they’ll tell you that in the U.S. and the U.K., ~30% of kids say their dream profession is YouTuber/Vlogger, higher than any other profession. (P.s., in China that top profession? 56% of kids said an astronaut).
• Video-as-a-Medium – Time spent watching online videos has doubled for Teens since 2015, and today watching and creating are both popular passtimes.
• Right-sized content – While the original title of this bullet could have been “short-form content”, and attention spans for teens seem like they’re getting shorter with the advent of TikTok, within the context of education, it’s much more appropriate to say “right-sized content”. While relative to most lectures, shorter is likely better, a 15-second video will not truly teach a concept. Is 15 seconds enough as a reminder of the phases of mitosis though? Sure, and it might even be enough to make sure a student remembers it on that test at the end of the week.