The human element of learning

How the social, emotional, and community elements of learning can be more important than the content itself.

I’ve had the idea for this post kicking its way around my head for a bit now: how do social, emotional, and community elements of learning contribute to engagement and persistence?¹ I’m thinking in the context of both traditional classrooms and job/tech-related training for adults; in all of these environments, there’s been more talk of incorporating AI and making things more on-demand or personalized.

But what do these (often theoretical) hyper-personalized, AI/tech-driven learning environments leave out?

A few weeks back, I saw a LinkedIn post in which the author talked about her favorite teacher and asked others to share reflections about their own favorite teachers in the comments.

What stood out to me, but didn’t necessarily surprise me, was how her post and subsequent commenters emphasized emotions and soft skills: there were frequent mentions of listening, trust, and student autonomy. Descriptions of how teachers encouraged students or pushed them out of their comfort zone.

There were strikingly few mentions of what people actually learned in each teacher’s class.

How learners feel impacts how they engage and learn

In traditional classrooms, belonging and trust are key elements contributing to student persistence and success.

For instance, students feel more confident in their own academic skills and feel more intrinsically motivated to learn when their instructors are approachable, signal respect, and seem accessible to them.² Relationships in which students feel safe and supported are especially important when they’re faced with challenges or difficulties in learning³—which I might argue is a feature, not a bug, to the process of learning overall.

Multiple studies have connected the importance of belonging to student persistence and success, especially when students are faced with academic challenges. Increasing belonging can involve interventions or social activities that expose vulnerability in students, which further highlights the importance of a safe and supportive environment.

What happens when we try to offload learning to AI-powered tutors and self-paced learning on a large scale? We might not have enough data to draw sweeping conclusions yet, but as this article from The Hechinger Report suggests,

“No matter how human-like the conversation…students understand at a fundamental level that AI doesn’t really care about them, what they have to say in their writing or whether they pass or fail algebra. In turn, students will never really care about the bot and what it thinks.”

What would motivate them to keep trying after failure?

How does this impact training adults outside of formal education environments?

Many MOOCs and eLearning industry websites cite self-paced online course completion rates as hovering between 5-15%, which is pretty low. While course completion rates aren’t a good measure of learning on their own, it seems pretty obvious that learning isn’t happening if the course isn’t at least being completed.

How might these low completion rates be related to the emotional and social aspects of learning that I discussed above?

Designing learning according to adult learning theory

Malcolm Knowles’ theory of andragogy outlines six key motivators for adult learners. Personally, I think we take the idea of self-concept and intrinsic motivation to the extreme in creating learning experiences for adults: we allow them to be self-directed and independent by serving learning in the form of self-paced courses (perhaps with AI assistance). This also tends to rely on intrinsic motivation—we assume learners have enough to actually complete the course and then apply what they’ve learned.

But low course completion rates suggest we must be missing something here.

Knowles’ theory also includes adults’ “readiness to learn” and the “role of experience” as motivators for adult learning:

• Readiness to learn: “As a person matures, their readiness to learn becomes increasingly oriented towards the developmental tasks of their social roles and life situations. Adult learners want to learn because of the roles they play in their current stage of life, whether at work or home as parents or spouses.”

• Role of experience: “Experience, in itself, can be a form of expertise that teachers should draw upon and use as a resource for learning.”

Could using social and emotional experiences to incorporate these motivators in adult learning increase learner persistence and success, as we’ve seen with students in traditional education settings?

Creating social spaces for adult learners

In my own experience, creating social spaces for adult learners does increase engagement; I’ve seen early signals of success by incorporating social and community-based learning experiences. Here are some examples:

• When I built Hypothesis Academy, I designed the courses as cohort-based instead of completely self-paced/on-demand. In their cohorts, participants used Hypothesis social annotation and participated in a Slack community to share ideas and experiences for using the tool in their own classrooms. Yes: this does mean more work from the Customer Education team, but we saw an average of 70% completion rates for these free and optional courses—much higher than the often-cited 5-15%.

• When I was running virtual instructor-led training at Ninety, I typically started sessions with 5 minute breakout rooms, where participants shared their own experiences and challenges they were hoping to solve with the tool. I found that starting sessions with the breakout rooms increased engagement throughout the rest of the live sessions, and increased persistence through the entire series (the series consisted of 3-90 minute workshops).

Why do I think these experiences increased engagement and success? Drawing from the two motivators I highlighted from Knowles’ theory of andragogy, learners were able to act within their work roles and share their own experiences as a part of the learning experience.

In these examples, learners also often connected over having similar struggles with integrating new technology into their work and shared tips for overcoming these hurdles and increasing the chances of success. Community and connection become important when learners were faced with challenges. These aspects of the learning environment provided them with easier access (and a higher number of crowdsourced options) for alternative paths to success.

Increasing social and emotional presence for all learners

It’s clear in my mind that learning is more effective in an environment where you feel safe to ask questions, make mistakes, and have the opportunity to connect with others.

I fear that the solutionism presented by AI and on-demand, self-paced learning may overshadow the role of human connection in learning. Are we teaching content, or are we shaping learners who are more confident to tackle challenges on their own?

I think when we focus on developing AI-driven, personalized, and on-demand learning, we are focused too greatly on scaling accessibility to content. While content is an important foundation, it’s not going to develop thinkers and innovators in society.

Whether I’m teaching my Gender and Technology class or training someone on using a new SaaS tool, I’m less concerned about a learner remembering a specific person or term, or a pattern of clicks.

I want them to feel confident in taking the next steps. Do they have a better idea of how to think about a concept, or approach integrating a new technology? Do they have a broad understanding of the challenges and solutions we’re discussing and the value of that conversation? Do they know where to turn if they’re stuck or unsure?

What are we losing when we lose the human element of learning?

Some thanks/shoutouts and resources

The idea for this post was inspired by a couple of short conversations with other educators that I want to thank/call out here:

• Justin Cerenzia (who runs the CTL at the Episcopal Academy, and also has a Substack)

• Nicole L’Etoile (who writes Design with Accessibility in Mind)

We recently had short conversations(/exchanged LinkedIn comments, ha) about the humanity in teaching and cohort-based learning. Thanks for inspiring this post!

If you’re interested in learning more about increasing approachability, accessibility, and respect with students in traditional classrooms, check out this proceedings paper I wrote for the Distance Teaching and Learning Conference in 2018 about building rapport in online courses. These strategies have served me well in teaching asynchronous online courses, but they also could easily be adapted for in-person courses or hybrid settings.

Thanks for reading, all, and happy Wednesday 👋🏻

1. Persistence is referencing to completing a course/learning experience in this context.

2. Micari, M., & Pazos, P. (2012). Connecting to the Professor: Impact of the Student–Faculty Relationship in a Highly Challenging Course. College Teaching, 60(2), 41-47. doi:10.1080/87567555.2011.627576

3. Pedler, M., Yeigh, T., & Hudson, S. (2020). The Teachers’ Role in Student Engagement: A Review. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 45(3). http://dx.doi.org/10.14221/ajte.2020v45n3.4

Full quote of note here: “confirm the importance of positive teacher-student relationships in the Australian secondary school context as it is these supportive relationships, where teachers take an interest in individuals and their needs, that are crucial to developing positive attitudes for learning and the ability to cope with challenges and adversity. Conversely, when students experience insecure relationships with their teachers or they feel unsafe or victimised, student engagement tends to decrease and students can experience anxiety or feel dejected in classroom tasks” (p53)