EPALE Thematic Coordinator Andrew McCoshan reflects on EPALE’s content in February and finds it has much to reveal about how we should really see social media as well as its value as a learning tool across the whole range of learners, from adult educators to people who have issues with basic skills.

Larissa Rima provided an important reality check about what social media are really all about.  She highlighted that we don’t need to master all social media platforms: rather, it’s more important to understand how the people we work with communicate. Indeed, it’s less about the apps and more about our communication skills.  She also stressed that quality is not about whether something is visually perfect but whether it makes a difference!

Francesca Operti showed that social media make it possible for adult learners to be valuable contributors to their lessons rather than just passive receivers.  Exchanges of experiences, reflection and co-creation of knowledge have been designed into their learning in the project she discussed. This fostered a sense of ownership for the courses. Participants also used a Facebook page to connect both among themselves and with the course organisers.

Ben Vaske, director of the Dutch NGO Oefenen.nl, argued that social media would be an ideal tool in basic skills education but good educational apps for adult learning are scarce due to a lack of research and poor funding for developing educational social media.  This is despite the fact that the ingredients are simple: easy-to-use applications that are practical and apply basic skills to everyday situations, supported by short videos and easy-to-understand language.

However, more than their differences, these examples show the commonalities that exist in the value of social media across such diverse groups:

• They enable learner collaboration. Participants can work together on group assignments as well as building personal and professional relationships.  Francesca Operti showed how an online network could be developed thanks to a Facebook group where participants could continue to exchange views and projects on adult education. In fact, this has helped learners to become a genuine community of adult educators.
• Learners can take greater responsibility for their learning. This is true amongst adult educators but, as Ben Vaske pointed out, adults with low-level education are often seasoned users of mobile platforms, games and social media. The apps he advocated would guide users towards cooperative learning environments where they could decide for themselves what learning goals they would like to work on with others.

• Online learning environments can be fun, interesting and accessible.  As Ben Vaske pointed out, online collaborative learning is free of the negative associations that adults with low educational attainment often have with formal group learning, classrooms and tests.  Francesca Operti showed how adult educators like the way they have been using social media so much that participants from the same countries have set up their own informal Facebook groups.
• They can be easy for educators to set up and maintain. Existing social media like Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp have functionalities that can be used in education.  They have the enormous advantage that people across the spectrum, from low to high levels of education, typically use them daily.

Andrew McCoshan has worked in education and training for over 30 years. For more than 15 years he has conducted studies and evaluations for the EU, and before that was a consultant in the UK. Andrew is currently an independent researcher and consultant, an ECVET Expert for the UK, and Senior Research Associate at the Educational Disadvantage Centre at Dublin City University in Ireland.