Taking Education beyond four walls through Social Learning Model

In their article, Schooling as a Knowledge Profession, Jal D. Mehta, Louis M. Gomez, & Anthony S. Bryk, point out various flaws with the current educational system, the greatest of which being that we are still operating within a paradigm that mirrors the antiquated trends of the industrial age. Today, the biggest challenge in the field of Education is the Quality of education. More and more educational organizations are adapting the Social Learning Model which is indeed changing the world as we know it. Social Learning is a powerful blend of Social networking and e-learning, which is transforming the traditional classroom education to an online collaborative platform for teaching, learning and improving the students performance by shortening the time needed for mastering, increasing retention, and increasing engagement. The Social Learning has been in existence for more than a dozen years, yet its impact in terms of masses is still relatively low in comparison with other educational approaches. The rise of social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, and various blogging sites has played a role in revolutionizing the educational system. In the past, students would attend class, take notes, take a test and be done with that subject or class. During this time, teachers would have a finite amount of time to interact with students, pose questions, fuel conversation, etc. However, there has been a trend shift towards the incorporation of more social media outlets into the education system, albeit on an informal basis. Now, when students get out of class, they have the opportunity to share their thoughts, experiences, and class notes with their peers, those in their classes as well as those who are not. Furthermore, educators also have the chance to pose questions outside of class for students to think about: questions, which are also available to the public for responses and reflections (Source). The beauty of social media as it pertains to social learning is that discussion is opened up to a broader audience outside of the classroom. Students and educators alike now have the ability to discuss what they are learning and teaching with a much wider community, and with that, we get a wider amount of people each having the potential to keep the conversation going by bringing their own unique perspective. It is clear that social media has already changed the face of the education system for the better. There are more people than ever for us to learn from.