Using Medium’s Platform for Active Teaching and Learning
How to move Medium articles from information delivery to active education
Medium users will know about the platform’s standard opportunities to publish predominantly written pieces with visual support. Many of us — especially those who, like me, have a learning impairment and engage less effectively than average readers — also deeply appreciate that, in contrast to many platforms, there is a “read aloud” function that adds an additional further element to the multimedia opportunities. Other tools for interaction — allowing highlights, sharing, and responses, particularly to specific sections in the text – further elevate Medium to a platform with significant potential for dynamic knowledge creation.
Despite these foundational opportunities however, I have never seen anyone use the Medium platform in the ways that I have recently experimented as part of more active educational initiatives. Indeed, surprisingly, these opportunities do not seem to have been discovered by organisations such as OpenLearn — so, if you want to chat Open University?… :-)
Given that I think I’ve done something rather novel, I thought it valuable to shares these experiments. The methods I’ve used can certainly be applied to educational endeavours and might also be useful for others seeking to maximise engagement and “take-aways” (so, learning then…) from their contributions.
I have embedded the story of my bricolage with some introductory background about how they came about, and then provided a simple “how-to” for anyone interested in joining this experimentation.
My “Medium” of Entry
Like many vocational academics I have some notes regarding traditional publication and dissemination avenues for knowledge.
Peer reviewed journals — where the content and presentation of submissions are quality controlled by other, ideally more experienced thinkers in the field — and books are controlled by for-profit publication companies, with their structures of gatekeeping and essential censorship. While I agree with others that the principles and practices of peer review are essential to truth and rigorous understanding (such as KamounLab, in a recent piece on publishing posters) the social trappings of needing to know the right people, and follow the fashions and trends — very often irrespective of actual value and academic quality of research and proposed publications — are tiresome and contrary to the principles of the academic endeavour.
As there is little chance of fundamental reform within the current dissemination process from within the status quo — and don’t get my started on Universities — I’m of a similar mind to Douglas Giles, PhD that it’s the role of vocational and authentic intellectuals to innovate around these limitations when seeking to engage others in our work.
It was for this reason that my first use of Medium was for a disclosure of public information where I had identified legal wrong doing (“whistle blowing”). However, I soon realised this publication had not gained the traction I had hoped for. Oh well, back to the strategy desk on that one.
After learning my way around the Medium platform, I started to see significant possibility for teaching and learning — the processes of which I have obsessed with positively disrupting throughout my career as a academic university teacher.
I’ve always been invested in technology and digitally enhanced learning opportunities. This gave me a head start following the significant failures of UK University leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic, and I used the pain and suffering of that period to significantly enhance my practices.
Online education is now rightly developing greater traction and it offers the opportunity for the further democratisation of knowledge and learning, as new platforms emerge to compete with traditional instructive institutions. The issue of quality assurance is a significant one — as The Conversation U.S. highlights about the emergence of independent providers in the area of prison education — but for those of us who have seen different sides of the public, pseudo public and private providers divide, no one model is inherently better: any given model just needs leaders and educators who are genuinely invested in meaningful learning outcomes (you would be amazing at the numbers of those are just happy to fill the class time and take the money / qualifications), and of course the skills and abilities.
The “Medium” of Experimentation: Our educational up-start / start-up
My experiments with Medium coincided with cooperation on a new research and educational initiative. Working with a friend, a man of great talent in the area of creative engagement — who has supported many organisations, individuals and causes to tell their stories using multimedia communication and principally film — we wanted to sidestep the limitations of conventional institutions while borrowing from their positive intellectual and operational qualities.
Overall, our new initiative — CATLAN or the Community for Alternative Thought, Action and Learning in Nature — focuses on (A)lternatives to the socially unjust and environmentally unsustainable status quo of human existence. Given that we practice what we preach, everything we do is (A)lternative (with a capital and parenthesised “A”).
One of our (A)lternative practices has been to build our online presence on Medium, as opposed to through a traditional webhosting service. We cluster all the webpages as Medium “articles” in a CATLAN “publication”.
As an aside: our deeper (A)lternative practice is to publish our work as we think: so everything is always a “draft” and visitors can always seen inside our thought, therefore rendering it as transparent as possible. You can see all our current drafts from our Medium home page below:
Overall, CATLAN is primarily a residential research and learning community, based in the enchanting and highly stimulating Pays Catalan in the French Pyrenees. However, with an eye to inclusivity, access and decolonisation, we aspire to build a wider, more spatially and temporally diverse community of thinkers and learners.
One avenue for this is an evolving suite of online learning opportunities, and we have started with a core academic interests of my own: intellectual leadership for positive change and transformation.
Creating Active Learning Opportunities with Medium
Following CATLAN’s emerging Teaching and Learning Philosophy, we believe effective education fundamentally requires the “transposition” of information from an external source into the internal context of a leaner’s existing knowledge: and this is where we have started in reimagine Medium’s potential as a platform of more active experiences of learning.
Speaking mechanistically, learning is promoted through active thought and the transposition of information from one physical context to another. The traditional learning practice of making written notes from a spoken lecture or original text well illustrates how this might work.
However, forcing learners to move new information and knowledge between intellectual contexts is the real mechanism of knowledge construction. And, this is why most online education that requires interaction for the sake of it, not as a means to promote pedagogically informed process, is failing its often paying learners. You can see a further critique of online learning in my article about Rent Smart Wales’ training provision:
There are basic opportunities that can be embedded with Medium for this. Writers can ask questions of readers, and these can be presented in ways that maximises the likelihood of people responding with actual, conscious and active thought….
Do you know how you might encourage a reader to actually consider a question posed?
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Seriously, take 3 minutes to think about this question before reading on.
Click this link to continue on a new page (Not really, but I could have required you to progress to a new page to find out more)
Thought is an active process and essential for learning — much to the annoyance of pretty much all learners at some stage in their efforts. However, simply forcing or ideally inspiring free abstract thinking often lacks quality control processes, and there are very long standing traditional education techniques than can be embedded into a Medium article to provide these.
One such classroom practice is to create activities structured by the process of Thinking, Pairing and Sharing. Here learners are
- Given stimulus and time to think for themselves;
- Invited to share with one other learner, as a means to check their thinking in a low risk situation, potentially obtain feedback and hopefully confidence they have a valid response;
- Invited to share active transposition of new information into new knowledge, by speaking thoughts out loud, drawing on a shared piece of paper etc.
The important underlying principle of the above is that learners are ‘forced’ to work new information into existing knowledge and usually further within the confines of language, written or oral, all of which requires transposition practical and intellectual work. This proactively creates the opportunity for assimilation and learning. What is produced can then be validated and reviewed by others, including the tutor or other learners.
For these pedagogical processes we can make use of Medium’s more advanced features. In particular, page authors can embed Google Forms or other such widgets that offer the opportunity to invite readers/learners to produce something and submit this, either prior to and/or after engaging some new information, be this written text, an image or an embedded video.
You can see examples of this in CATALN’s free class, part of the longer learning experience on Intellectual Leadership for Change and Transformation in Nature:
To create such learning opportunities all you need to do is create a free form using Google Forms, and then embed it within your article. To do this:
- Create your form.
- When you have finished click “Send” (see 1 below)
- Select the “link” tab (2), and copy and paste the URL (3) into your Medium article and press enter. Medium then renders the URL address as the completed form inside a HTML box.
You can add multiple Google Forms to an article, some of which might contain multiple choice questions, other longer form answers. This can allow you to shift the focus of learning from basic assimilation of content (comprehension) in the early stages, through to more complex processing of this knowledge: such as via requirements to synthesis or critically review one set of new information with other knowledge (existing or also newly presented).
A further more technically advanced possibility is to mimic the “conditionality” available in professional and very expensive educational platforms such as Moodle.
Because Medium allows you to create unlisted pages, that can only be accessed by a direct link, you can withhold this link in the Medium article, but instead past it into a customised acknowledgment from Google Forms. This way, the reader/learner, needs to make a submission before they can move to the next learning activity.
Google Forms also gives you to provide learners with the opportunity to be tracked, by submitting their email address. Or, you can keep the barriers to participation lower by allowing submission without this requirement. Google Forms can be used to create quizzes with marks, promote accessibility, and has many more options besides.
One final point to make is that a more basic tool of Medium offers something that even the most developed Educational platforms often overlook. The opportunity for readers to highlight any part of the content and provide a response allows real time feedback. Learners can ask for clarification, share wider knowledge with others, and even offer comments on the pedagogical efficacy of the teaching — without needing to wait until the bureaucratic and largely pointless “end of course feedback” form.
A key issue for quality learning experiences however, is not so much the technological possibilities, but the use of these to express complex and well thought-out pedagogical process — a brilliant summary of these has recently been produced by Theo Seeds and can be found here.
If you have not already, please consider adding a highlight and responding to this article, thereby getting involved,!experimenting with Medium’s potential for active learning and knowledge exchange.
Also, if you appreciated this “short course” on using Medium, “clapping” increases the likelihood it will be recommended to others; following me means you receive updates about other articles and courses I create.
