The scenario posed in this posed an interesting question, how can people recognize the value of becoming part of a learning community and the benefit of social learning?

So, this poses two questions, what is a learning community, and what is social learning? While both these concepts have many, slightly varying, definitions, I came across one regarding the former that I found particularly interesting. In Zhu et al. (2005, p. 253), the definition of learning community has been described as “working collaboratively toward shared, significant academic goals in environments in which competition, if not absent, is at least de-emphasized.” The interesting part here is of course the absence or at least downplay of competition. This is a concept I have been trying to invoke in my own teaching, having weekly pass or fail assignment / reflections that the student will then discuss in small groups during the upcoming lesson. Students have reported that they feel they have gained a better understanding of the many nuances of the assignments, and that there might be more than one correct way of solving the task.

This seems to be supported by a study conducted by Gutiérrez-Braojos et al. (2019) who found in their experiment that collaboration, without competition, in a face-to-face environment resulted in more contributions from the students with a higher cognitive quality. Interesting enough, the authors also investigated the difference between the face-to-face group with a virtual e-based group. This is where it gets interesting. The authors found that, although there were no difference in the number of contributions between the two groups (the psychical, face-to-face group and the virtual, e-learning based group), the complexity and cognitive quality was deemed lower in the virtual group.

In my search around for articles on the topic, I cam across another study from 2019, by Bilgin and Gul. They too compared face-to-face with virtual learning, but with a twist. For the virtual group they introduced the concept of gamification to see if it affected the attitudes towards assignments. The element of gamification is an interesting idea as it creates a dynamic between students in that “another individual, typically a conspecific, plays some role in supplying the learner with the information that is subsequently learned” (Heyes, 2012, p. 7). Or in other words, social learning. What Bilgin and Gul (2019) found was that, although adding the element of gamification did not affect the attitude towards the assignment, it did lead to higher commitment, better learning and promoted group cohesion.

This poses some interesting questions around non-collaborative group work with elements of gamification, to help, build, and shape each others learning and experience. A topic ripe for further investigation, indeed.