How to Turn Your Social Networks into a Free Educational Platform

On average, we spend 2.5 hours a day on social media. Founder of Insight Group, Katerina Bogina, spoke on how to create a personalized educational system in social networks, giving anyone the ability to learn while scrolling through the news feed.

About the expert: Katerina Bogina – managing partner and co-founder of Insight group – an educational group of companies. Creator and presenter of educational programs for international and Russian companies, such as Beeline, Gazprombank, X5 Retail Group, and NLMK. For more than ten years, she has been researching learning technologies, self-learning and organizational development, heading the leading Russian team of scribers.

I have mastered a huge number of professional and personal skills with the help of social networks, everything ranging from fitness, proper nutrition and style to management and financial management.

Any new skill gets sorted through a predetermined framework, which helps one dive into a new area. For example, when I became interested in style, matching clothes and shopping, my social networks turned into one big catwalk and an online clothing store for several months. Stylish selections of photos and informative posts helped me learn how to combine clothes in style.

The pages of fashion bloggers helped from saturation of styles to determine at a glance what is stylish and what is not. After a while, I realized that I had studied the topic enough, and unsubscribed from all bloggers and stores, except for a narrow group of training pages. I am currently learning how to make decisions based on data driven decision making for my business. The starting point is social networks and my news feed. I recommend the same approach to the participants of my educational programs in order to master any topic from leadership to project management.

Social networks, as an educational portal, do not replace classical education, but rather complement it. By subscribing to several educational schools, you can study their programs, the quality of education they provide, the presentation of the material, and then consciously choose the educational program that suits you best.

By consciously working with social media algorithms, you are creating a personalized educational ecosystem of continuous learning. Such a system will help you explore a new topic and naturally and unobtrusively master new knowledge and skills. Here is a guide on how to build it.

How to use trends in education

The concept of lifelong learning is becoming more prominent. The means of learning are also changing. Previously, people received an education, and then worked and developed within the framework of the profession they had decided to master. Now people change several jobs and professions throughout their lifetimes. To learn new skills and grow in their profession, each person must learn to learn, all to become their own coach, mentor and trainer.

Another popular trend is the creation of an ecosystem around a product. Companies are trying not just to sell products to clients from time to time, but to “encase” their everyday lives with their communication and product lines. These include the IT giants like Sberbank, Yandex, and Mail.ru Group. All of them are fighting to retain users and keep them entangled in constant interaction with their products. Such an approach is also useful for the user of the ecosystem, since all the services and products they are looking for can be found in one place, like in a large shopping center.

The third social trend is digital footprints and digital anonymity. The docudrama Social Dilemma made quite a stir. The film talks about what data social networks collect about us and just how personalized the content based on this data can be. Users leave a lot of digital traces and personal data, which can be used to recreate an exact psychological and social portrait.

All this is directly related to learning and, more importantly, to self-learning. You can try not to leave digital footprints and fight large ecosystems like neo luddites, or you can turn on critical thinking and start using technology to your advantage.

Classical learning is a specific product that should be consumed within the allotted time. For example, this is related to watching lessons and completing assignments. Then the person exits the educational experience in ordinary life, which is in no way connected with learning. By relying on an ecosystem approach, we will try to construct continuous learning in social networks.

How to create a learning environment in social media

The average person spends about 2.5 hours a day on social media. This is the time that we lack to learn new things. And, of course, social networks collect as much information about us as possible in order to show new, more targeted content. Our task is to turn them into an ideal educational ecosystem that will produce enriching content. And the task is to do it discreetly, in an interesting manner, and conveniently.

One week is enough to teach the algorithms what you are interested in getting right now. Go to the recommendations sections and take a look at the resulting data. Now I have a mix of fitness and professional materials there with accounts of directors, managers and experts on data driven.

To begin with, we will highlight the knowledge, skills and areas that will help you get into a new topic. This involves entire media and individual articles, thematic groups, role models, experts, exercises, promotional materials, and events.

Profile media

Use the search engines to find several thematic media that can publish useful materials in your field of interest. Next, subscribe to the pages of the media in social networks. Now you have access to all the updates of these magazines, channels, and portals. But this is not enough.

We need to train the algorithm to identify and post the interesting bits of data from the flow of information. To do this, like and save posts and materials that help you develop. At the same time, hide posts that you do not like from the feed, or those that do not relate to your area of interest. There will be fewer of them as a result.

Thematic groups

If you are learning a new profession, look for groups that professionals working in this field join to communicate. This will help you understand how people live, how they think, and what they discuss. You need to find live communities with ongoing discussions and content that is updated frequently. Such groups can be found by entering keywords in the search lines of social networks, primarily on Facebook and LinkedIn.

While studying analytics, I came across a bunch of accounts that are completely devoted to discussions of Excel. I do not need most of the details discussed therein, but the approach itself and the dashboard formats are very useful. To regulate your feed, like the appropriate posts and hide the useless ones.

Role models and experts

You can also find people in such groups who are constantly writing and commenting posts. We are looking for experts and / or role models – people who are successfully applying the skill that we want to master. Let us subscribe to 20-30 people. Like their posts that are of value, since they can be saved for the future.

Expert blogs help you stay up-to-date with the latest developments in an industry, get useful assignments, find related books, and learn tips on mastering the skills you are looking for. When the social network algorithm understands who you are interested in, it will offer you to subscribe to experts and interesting accounts from the same field. First, you need to work on training the neural network, and then it will train you.

Thematic training organizations

The expert block includes training organizations. For example, if you want to learn design, sign up for five to ten schools or courses that teach design. You will thus quickly form a selection of content with course news, teachers, and interesting exercises.

Hashtags

They help you see all the latest or most popular content on a select topic. For example, on Instagram, you can subscribe to all the updates related to specific hashtags. This is the ideal means of working with a database.

Scroll through different hashtags until you find the ones that give you the most useful content. This way, you will automatically get the best content in your feed. Save everything you like in collections and the algorithms will produce more similar content.

The hashtag #datadriven helped me find useful content and experts that I later subscribed to. I found a lot of good ideas there that I incorporated into my work.

Targeted advertising

These are ads that are based on your interests and preferences. To get a good targeted selection, you will have to sweat for it a bit by persistently showing your preferences to the algorithms. Like profile posts, save collections on topics, and subscribe to thematic educational institutions. After a while, you will see some interesting ads popping up. For example, collections with training courses, conferences and events. I constantly receive invitations to a huge number of thematic conferences. They find me by themselves. All I need to do is choose the ones I want to attend.

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To find employees, companies often set up targeted ads for subscribers of several thematic groups.

How to learn with social media

You will open up your social networks more than once during the day. You will scroll through your feed and read everything that appears there with varying degrees of interest. But now, the content will consist of good advice and useful materials on a new topic. The incoming information will start forming a more correct view of the required area.

The funny thing is that there is almost no work to be done. You just have to carefully set up a net in the best fishing spot and wait for the fish to group.

For example, if you start eating right, you will not even notice how you will start picking recipes on Pinterest, buying products recommended by a fitness blogger on YouTube, and watching short videos about a conscious approach to eating in Stories on Instagram. This is your new, personally collected news feed in your personal profile on the social network. You do not need to create a new account specifically for any purpose. Save all the useful videos and posts so you can watch them later just by collecting them in your own library.

How much time should you spend on such social networks? The same as before, except the content will become much more useful. You will still scroll through part of the feed without paying much heed to it, but the information will be stored in memory.

By consciously working with social media algorithms, you will eventually receive a perfectly tuned, personalized learning ecosystem of continuous learning that fosters your continued immersion into a new topic in a microlearning format. Social media content will turn from a spate of flashy cat videos and celebrities to collections of exercises, reviews and posts from people who already have the skill you need.

How to continue learning

I recommend paying close attention to exercises and events. If you stumble upon a practice, take 10-15 minutes a day to do the recommended activities. For example, cook a healthy dish, draw a picture, or make an Excel spreadsheet in a different way. The acquired knowledge will thus turn into regular practice.

Take a couple of courses on a new topic or go to a specialized conference. Conferences are a concentrated clot of information on a new topic that explore how the industry lives, the affairs of its key representatives, the results, and the recommended approaches. Do not forget to subscribe to all the interesting speakers of the conference, because they can share a lot of useful and interesting material with you after the event itself.

In the “Can’t write off” Telegram channel, we talk even more about trends in education and how to learn throughout your life while doing it with pleasure. Subscribe to our channel!