How Peer-To-Peer Learning Can Be Digitized for Students
by Calix Huang
When you have a project to complete, do you prefer working alone or working in groups? I’m sure many of you out there prefer working alongside someone else, or even with a group; it can be exciting, motivating, and can hold you accountable to actually reaching your goals.
Working and learning both depend on motivation, accountability and engagement, which the core pillars of peer-to-peer learning.
What is peer-to-peer learning?
Peer-to-peer learning is a set of pedagogical styles in which a group of people work with each other to make learning easier for one another. It could be through studying with others in a library, working together to finish homework, or even tutoring one another in their respective subjects of expertise.
The effectiveness of peer-to-peer learning stems from the presence of others, whether it be physically or virtually. The benefits of peer-to-peer learning are many: research shows that learners can solidify their own understanding of a concept by teaching it to someone else.
Peer to peer learning also creates a shared and personalized learning environment, and can boost everyone’s productivity through accountability and camaraderie. (Galbraith and Winterbottom, 2011, Beasley, 1997, Hobri, 2018)
When done right, peer-to-peer learning can create a sense of community and cooperation amongst participants, produce cognitive gains, lower distress, and enhance course satisfaction. (Fantuzzo, 1989)
Peer-to-peer learning is going digital
Many educational resources are going digital in today’s age, including peer-to-peer learning platforms. In 2021, students are often going to third-party services for personal support instead of to their own educational institution. Though the services they use may have different use cases, it’s notable that many big players in Edtech revolve around peer-to-peer interactions.
Examples of digital peer-to-peer learning in action include:
Brainly is one of the biggest educational and homework help forums on the Internet. With over 350m+ students and teachers on the platform, Brainly is one of the go-to services for students all over the world to ask any homework question. These questions are answered by other students and teachers alike, and creates one of the best marketplaces for homework help knowledge. Notably, students who choose to answer questions on Brainly are also receiving the benefits of peer tutoring.
Fiveable (where I work) represents a new kind of social learning strategy: community-based learning. Fiveable centers its focus around creating a supportive, inclusive community for high school students, and creates top-of-the-line AP content to support those students in their AP classes. Moreover, the tens of thousands of community members not only support one another through classwork, but also through the common stressors that affect high school students: the pressure of college applications, mental health stressors, and more.
Schoolhouse.world, started by Sal Khan (founder of Khan Academy), has created its own global, student-powered community that provides online tutoring to K-12 students everywhere on topics like AP classes, SAT/ACT testing, and standard curriculum classes. Unlike Brainly, which connects students to peers and tutors, Schoolhouse.world only allows students in the community. Tutors are student volunteers, and tutees are students as well. Using Zoom, and recently branching into the creation of group study spaces for students, similar to those seen on peer-to-peer platforms Hours and StudyStream, Schoolhouse.world is aiming to take peer-to-peer learning to the next level for students.
Synthesis is a global community designed for kids aged 6-14 to learn to become better thinkers and problem-solvers. Spun out of SpaceX and inspired by Elon Musk, Synthesis is taking a very innovative approach to learning by presenting special exercises, puzzles, and challenges that kids will learn to solve. Moreover, every single thing that a student does in Synthesis is collaborative with a custom cohort. Kids join together onto Zoom calls, share their screens, and work through puzzles together, putting their heads together to come up with innovative solutions. Cohorts are run on a rolling-basis and in multiple time zones, allowing kids from all over the world to participate, which not only increases accessibility, but also the diversity within discussions.
Wait, but isn’t peer-to-peer learning being done in in-person classrooms?
It’s a valid question. At the end of the day, classrooms have been the default learning space for students for centuries, and they have their strengths for peer-to-peer learning, especially in the provision of a shared physical space. Classrooms consistently get students in the same room together and provide the resources needed to facilitate learning: buildings, desks, supplies, technology, food, etc.
So then, why are classrooms often so ineffective for peer-to-peer learning?
Many classrooms are naturally unnatural. Classrooms too often employ rules that are highly unnatural to how humans normally behave and learn: with one teacher up front, students all sitting the same way, and everyone asking permission to speak or use the restroom, social learning is too often left by the wayside.
Though a number of peer-to-peer learning methods have been developed and adopted by educators, many classrooms still resort to a traditional form of learning that is becoming more and more ineffective, especially compared to online options. Methods such as Jigsaw Classrooms, Harkness Table, project-based learning, problem-based learning, and classwide peer tutoring are all very effective teaching methods to use in classrooms, but unfortunately, they aren’t widely adopted.
Traditional classroom education don’t work for the following reasons:
“No talking during class.” For most classrooms, the default rule is to be quiet and listen to the teacher talk. Regardless of whether the content being presented is helpful or not, new concepts should be solidified further through discussion, rather than just each student taking her own notes in the classrooms. Discussions, debates, and peer explanations are all practices that students should be empowered to do much more frequently.
Lack of personalization for each student within a classroom has always been a big issue without a clear solution. With such a high student-to-teacher ratio, teachers are only able to teach the same concepts to an audience full of students with different levels of knowledge. Although great teachers do differentiate their content and tailor it to the level and interest of different students, there’s often simply no time to differentiate for every student. It’s no one’s fault, but it’s merely a flaw of how classrooms are normally set up.
Teaching time is spent inefficiently within classrooms. Many lectures and classes involve teachers presenting the same material, or that already exists within the textbooks and student resources, or that has already been covered in previous lessons. Then, students spend their homework time solidifying the concepts they’ve absorbed. A much better way to approach this is through flipped learning in which students can access and learn the core concepts before class starts, and class time can be used to hold interactive, personalized teaching sessions based on everyone’s existing knowledge. Flipped learning represents a more effective, efficient way to spend teaching time in classrooms, and one that leverages the advantages of peer-to-peer learning.
Overall, traditional classrooms are ineffective because they don’t mirror what learning is like in the real-world. Outside of school, we learn through failures, discussions, creative and critical thinking. We learn through experiences and collaboration with peers and those smarter than us.
How can peer-to-peer learning be improved for students?
The short answer- is it already is… online. Beyond the platforms mentioned above, there are hundreds of other forms of student support on the Internet that are collaborative and community-oriented. There are student communities like AP Students, social-emotional learning and outlets like Teenager Therapy, and educational supports like Khan Academy and Emile, where students can collaborate around academic and AP content. Though the Internet can be a scary place, there are many safe heavens of student support that welcome students from all over the world. What educators can do to support students better is to help direct them to these services to act as alternatives to the missing aspects of peer-to-peer learning at school.
Traditional schooling is a calcified system that cannot be easily changed. Though teaching methods can be modified individually if teachers are willing to do so, too many teachers still rely on traditional methods. Schools that have moved to digital instruction because of the COVID lockdown offered one of the biggest chances to pivot that educational institutions have had in a long time, and it provides hope that so many schools are opting into a blended form of education, splitting between an in-person and virtual experience that can take advantage of online communities.
Why should we embrace virtual peer-to-peer learning?
A leap like this can be scary to many. There are pros and cons to a virtual or blended educational experience.
Based on your location, the clubs/classes your school provides or the administrative support like counselors may vary, but virtual peer-to-peer learning democratizes student support for everyone. Being able to digitize and scale all of these resources in a central platform accessible by all students connected to the Internet is a massive win for every student.
Moreover, meeting students from all over the world also increases diversity and tolerance amongst the community. While in-person educational institutions only bring together students from the same area, much can be learned from kids the same age that live halfway across the world.
Finally, creating an informal learning community that is an alternative to school will allow students to have more power and direction over their education. In informal peer-to-peer learning communities, there aren’t any credits to fill or requirements to complete - learners can simply be a part of a community they want to be in and explore their interests and passions.
Moving towards a virtual peer-to-peer experience comes with its cons as well.
In-person interactions are crucial to building real life friendships and maximizing physical learning experiences, like collaborative hands-on science projects and labs. There are certainly pros and cons to having a virtual, or even blended educational experience.
There’s still a major percentage of the global student population that does not have access to the Internet or a computer. For those who do, there’s still no technology that can simulate the physical and micro interactions that we have on a daily basis as students that are very important.
We are, however, making moves into that world: tools like Gather.town simulate a physical environment and interactions virtually, and there will soon be innovations in VR/AR/XR that will further improve peer-to-peer digital education.
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At the end of the day, creating spaces and environments for students to be collaborative is crucial for them to accelerate in their educational paths. Whether through enforcing new peer-to-peer learning methods in the classroom or empowering more individuals to start digital sources of student support, doubling down on peer-to-peer learning is one of the best ways to invest in the next generation of students and one of the best things educators can do for society.
Calix Huang is a high school student and the founder of social learning platform Hours, which was acquired by Fiveable. He is currently serving on leadership at Fiveable and contributing to Edtech Insiders.
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