🤳 TikTok is revolutionizing education
Gen Z is learning on TikTok and the educational system is taking notice
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🤳 TikTok is revolutionizing education
TikTok is the fastest-growing social media app in the world. The app gives users a catalog of music, graphic, and dialogue options to create short-form videos. It’s available in over 150 countries, has over 1 billion users, and has been downloaded over 200 million times in the United States alone.
Although TikTok is most known for the funny or entertaining videos that fill its feed, it has found remarkable success in the educational content space. Videos created on the app can facilitate “microlearning”—instruction delivered in short, bite-sized chunks—and this is resonating with users in the academic community.
“Have a 30-minute bus ride? Ten minutes in the dentist’s waiting room? Five minutes before dinner? That can now be study time — especially when study is blended with entertainment.” - Dorothy Zemach
Education has historically been slow to adapt to changes in students’ learning behavior, and this has never been more pronounced than it is today. By observing Gen Z’s use of TikTok, we get a glimpse of how the way we consume educational content is quickly changing and what platforms like TikTok can do to drive positive change in the educational space.
Speaking the lingua franca of young people
To figure out why the divide between learning behavior and the educational system is more expansive than ever and how to address this divide, we must first understand some of the nuances of Generation Z and the modern educational system.
Gen Z Characteristics
Gen Z is the first “digital native” generation in history. Gen Zers shares many characteristics with Millennials, including their high self-awareness and self-motivation. However, they’re more educated, diverse, and pragmatic than their predecessors.
They were born into a world of Instagrams and TikToks, of influencers and Renegade dances. To Gen Z, a walkman player or a floppy disk might as well be ancient technology from the Mesozoic Era.
They’ve known no other life than one with stimuli from the abundant technology they’re surrounded by. As a result of these increased stimuli, Gen Z has a shorter attention span and better ability to multitask than previous generations.
The modern educational system is fighting against this current.
Modern Education
With its heavy emphasis on standardized testing, the modern educational system incentivizes teachers to teach their students what they’re learning and what it means. Still, it doesn’t push them to teach students why what they’re learning matters.
Writer Seth Godin famously said that the focus of modern schooling could be summarized with one question: Will it be on the test?
With teachers not incentivized to get students interested in the material they’re learning, it’s no wonder that Gen Z doesn’t find modern schooling to be fulfilling and rewarding.
“Teaching kids what the text says and what the text means isn’t the hard part. Helping them grasp why the text matters, which usually occurs during fourth through eighth grade, is much more challenging. If kids [...] do master this, the result is that they see themselves in the text, translate that into their writing, and finally see themselves as writers.” - Meg Burke, an instructional literacy coach and English teacher from Doylestown, PA
Bridging The Gap
Through TikTok, students get to learn helpful material in a format that keeps them engaged. The educational content on the app is conducive to the learning behaviors of Gen Zers for many reasons, including:
A focus on the bare bones of a lesson with an additional entertainment factor that keeps Gen Zers engaged
The ability to access content asynchronously, providing additional entry points to the curriculum, and the ability to revisit bite-sized clips
A social experience where students can engage in discussion in comments and build new interests and friendships on the app
Some TikToking teachers, like English teacher Claudine James, are rewarded with enormous followings of students who resonate with the content by creating valuable educational content in a simple-to-digest and entertaining package. Within one week, Mrs. James’ TikTok account—@iamthatenglishteacher—grew to around 10k followers. Within six weeks, she had around 100k followers. Today, she has over 2.7 million followers on the app (and counting).
Teachers who embrace TikTok as an educational tool—whether they’re creating videos or not—are also engaging in a form of soft diplomacy by using the app as a way of being more relatable to students. This focus on relatability is especially pertinent in a time when students are feeling immense pressure from the combination of online learning and rigorous online school schedules while feeling little practical and emotional support from teachers and educational institutions at large.
Students long for support and care from teachers, as well as from educational institutions and decision-makers more largely. Research has found that online learning environments can adequately—and, often, quite richly and productively—support the implementation of pedagogies of care; this requires teachers to care for non-academic aspects of student life and “see“ the whole student. [source]
Longer-form content will always have its place in the educational system. After all, I’m not sure how effective it would be to teach the whole of AP Chemistry through a series of 60-second video clips. There’s a danger of fragmentation and lack of suitability for absorbing complex information requiring more focused study periods. However, it’s becoming clear that bite-sized educational content (sometimes referred to as microlearning) is an effective way of:
Sharing information with the latest generation in an exciting way
Reinforcing the material studied in-depth in class
Bridging the empathy gap between teachers and students
For educators that want to resonate with their Gen Z students, the message is clear: meet your students where they are.
TikTok doubling down on educational content
The educational content on TikTok is resonating, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed by the social media giant.
Last year, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, doubled down on its effort to promote educational content with the launch of its $50 million Creative Learning Fund.
This fund “supports creators with the production of learning content, provides resources for learners and introduces emerging teachers to the TikTok platform.” The fund launched during the pandemic, with a focus on creators who “offer us creative learning especially during this tough time.” Experts collaborating with TikTok to promote #LearnOnTikTok include Bill Nye The Science Guy, Lily Singh, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
A few months after launching the Creative Learning Fund, TikTok temporarily launched a Learn tab on its app, intending to consolidate educational content—including premium content from the experts mentioned above—in one place. The tab has since been removed for reasons unknown, but users can instead explore the #LearnOnTikTok hashtag on the app for a similar feed.
It’s worth noting that TikTok’s motives for this are not purely self-motivated. They’re facing pressures from authorities who are increasingly aware of the harmful influence their platform might have and the massive increase in use since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Doubling down on educational content also serves to redirect attention from the risks their platform presents by underlining the positive value it creates for society.
With TikTok’s apparent intent to encourage more educational content on its platform and the demonstrated demand of users, who are consuming such material at a high rate, we can expect to see the continued increase in educational content on the platform in the coming years.
The (Serious) Risks
Any discussion around the benefits of social media would be remiss without discussing risks, especially for users in their formative years.
The risks and dangers that social media presents are well-documented, and TikTok is no exception. Users are vulnerable to bullying, data privacy, and inappropriate content on the app.
Many parents and experts think that teachers should avoid compelling their students to sign up for any social media accounts, including TikTok, in part because it’s unclear what the companies who run these platforms do with the personal data they collect. Privacy concerns are especially pronounced in discussions about TikTok due to its Chinese ownership.
However, teachers discouraging the use of social media amongst students are in a losing battle. Instead, it’s likely more effective for teachers to teach practices for using the app safely. To protect users, a TikTok spokeswoman said, the app has safeguards like “privacy settings, controls over who can view or interact with content, and in-app reporting.
As with any powerful technology with benefits to society, the associated risks shouldn’t justify technological abstinence. However, they require that we work on the problems to mitigate the risks as much as possible. We have to engage with the technology if we want to alter its trajectory. In the case of TikTok, this includes finding ways to increase the urgency for mitigating abuse and harmful content from the platform. For advocating data privacy and making it easier to pursue safe practices.
In China, the country’s version of TikTok, Douyin*, now restricts students’ amount of time to access the app—a relatively extreme step in the fight against the negative consequences of the app. Enforcing this restriction may require the tight grasp of an authoritarian government (it requires parents to register their children with their real names and ages), but that is not to say that social media apps can’t be proactive about creating an ecosystem that mitigates its risks to students
* The company also released Xiao Qu Xing, a youth-oriented version of TikTok that is focused primarily on educational videos and doesn’t let users upload their own clips.
Summary
Microlearning has proven to be an effective tool for communicating with Gen Z
Educators who are choosing to meet Gen Z where they are by encouraging the use of TikTok as an educational tool are better positioned to resonate with their students
We can look forward to seeing more investments in the space of social education, like TikTok, to teach students in a way that resonates with them
The potential risks of TikTok and similar platforms are likely to be mitigated over time, as platforms face more scrutiny from authorities about the dangers they pose