Hack Club: a community for self-determined learning (A summer EdTech pick)
Introduction
In this summer pick, I would like to briefly present a picture of a particular online learning community [1] called Hack Club. I would recommend anyone interested in free, open learning to see this particular community. The goal of this essay is to briefly describe how the community works and why it’s an interesting space for self-directed learners.
Hack Club is a global, nonprofit, informal education network of high-school makers and student-led coding after-school clubs. After-school clubs and hackathon events represent a highly accessible opportunity for students to socialise and learn around fun and authentic activities [2], [3]. The organization was founded to saturate the need of students interested in coding, which traditional after-school clubs, often focused on sports, science and arts, did not cover. They also devoted a significant focus on the lacking of diversity in the IT sector.
Motivation
What initially sparked my interest in HC is that they are in many ways pioneers as they operate in a global, hybrid environment. Its learning community might be understood as an interesting scaffolding for self-directed or self-determined learning. From the educational perspective, we may see Hack Club as an environment for applied heutagogy or as a safe space for learning in a semi-connectivist and constructionist way.
Heutagogy is a paradigm which puts focus on the learner’s ownership over their learning journey. It is often described using the following key principles: human agency (learner-centeredness), capability, self-reflection and metacognition, double-loop learning, and non-linear learning. The theory manifests in self-determined learning in which learners choose what they want to learn and how. Self-determined learning, similar to self-directed learning, requires being ready for autonomy and acting as a teacher providing monitoring and evaluation to oneself [4]. But the fuel of a self-determined learner is intrinsic and aligned to the learner’s value system rather than externally motivated [5]. It’s up to learners to act autonomously, reflect on their work and learn from the reflection itself. The overall goal here is to develop capability rather than competency, which means being able to learn and apply skills in new unfamiliar situations. Heutagogy thus promotes future readiness [6].
In my opinion, one of the biggest problems of self-determined learning is its inherent dependency on social presence, which may not be apparent to learners and instructors as well. For example, e-learning design shouldn’t be confused with complex instruction or learning environments, in which social presence plays an important role. This is a simplifying attitude towards self-determined learning which I see as a trap for the learners. In his meta-study on success factors in online education, Gwern Branwern says “technology-driven shift in demand for Conscientiousness, not intelligence”, almost completely ignoring social aspects of learning [8]. While discussions around the design of e-learning, MOOCs and so on often emphasise the importance of social dimension, it seems to be more of a secondary part of the design that supplements the technology-supported content-first learning process. This content-first attitude is reasonable because it enables companies to create highly scalable products — various kinds of learning materials which are meant to be used as tools in the learning process. For such learning materials to be meaningfully used, its users must be very motivated learners with a good setup, or skilled instructors.
Heutagogy then has its pitfalls regards a lack of social presence. Ryan and Deci “argue that the central role of teachers and learning environments is to satisfy the student’s three basic emotional and social needs: the need for a sense of competence, the need for a sense of autonomy, and the need for a sense of relatedness” [7]. In self-directed learning, the need for social relatedness might be paradoxically covered up by heutagogy’s focus on self-determination and thus personalisation. As learners act based on their intrinsic motivations and personal learning needs, the probability they will find the right social environment by traditional means is lower unless they have access to a special environment which supports self-determined learning in a social environment. This might seem simple, but my intuition is that such a social environment must be designed respectfully for the heutagogy. Building such an environment in a system that enforces external motivation as the primary means likely creates value incoherence in the learner’s position, eventually setting extrinsic goals for the whole community.
The aspect of self-directed learning needing background infrastructure still seems to be very little understood at least in my humble opinion. I think Hack Club is a good example of an educational pursuit that balances some of the pitfalls of online education and self-determined learning by putting the community first.
The Hack Club Ecosystem
The history of the organisation can be tracked down between 2014 and 2015. Hack Club was founded by Zach Latta. At the time, the platform was called HackEdu and aimed at supporting student-led high school clubs. In its first year, the organisation brought about 40 high school clubs. At this point, they claim to be on 1 % of US high schools. In total, there are about 650 coding clubs across all continents with approx 400+ high schools attached to Hack Club’s activities. Hack Club online community has currently approx 20k total members with about 660 weekly active members growing organically with a spike during the summer of 2020 which can be claimed to the surge of covid 19 and Hack Clubs’ intensive public activities. The organisation has a 30-ish-person team.
Hack Club creates infrastructure to support coding clubs as well as independent learners or other non-profit projects. The first part of the infrastructure includes the back-office and front-office for the clubs. HC is run by The Hack Foundation NGO which acts as a fiscal sponsor, meaning that the foundation offers legal entity, annual-based funding to the clubs, and administrative processes and tools to reduce the burden of running the clubs for their leaders.
The online community is part of the infrastructure of HC and fits into its activities in several ways. The position of the community regards the clubs and the main HC activities is shown in the following diagram.
The community is the communication channel on which HC has direct influence over its members. Since the network of coding clubs is highly decentralised and the clubs are largely independent, the community plays uniting role that connects the clubs and their members in one global platform which amplifies the educational potential of individual clubs.
Below, we will describe how it works.
Coding clubs
According to Cedric Hutchings, a member of the HC team, most clubs do not participate in the online community as there are about 20 club leaders in the Slack of a total of 650 clubs based on my estimation. HC has little power over individual clubs, functioning and contents due to its decentralised nature. It’s also difficult to make general claims about the clubs since clubs don’t need to report to the organisation. Since our main interest is in the online community, we will cover the clubs only briefly. As we’ve suggested, clubs utilise HC as an infrastructural support and a shared identity.
As in typical after-school clubs, most coding clubs operate with zero budget and have a connection to high school that provides the basic support: mostly the physical space where clubs operate. Teachers may be involved as intermediaries between the high school and club leaders. Club size in terms of members varies, they are mostly students interested in coding or related things.
It is up to the club leaders how they organise meetings. However, most clubs are led as workshops similar to traditional teaching methods led by student club leaders. Formal environment and learning incentives like grading and strict structure don’t apply in the informal environment of their peers. For students, the coding clubs represent an opportunity to learn coding in a fun and more authentic setting. The students work at their own pace and follow their intrinsic motivations. They are encouraged to work on anything related to coding and have both physical and social space in the coding club for it.
HC gives the clubs the option to connect in the central online community. Attendees of the physical club meetings are encouraged to share their creations and experiences there. Showing off the work with other members of this community creates an extra opportunity to get feedback, interact and find a place among the bigger pool of members. Such a culture of sharing creates a strong basis for experiential learning as students present their work and often are encouraged to reflect on what they have done.
Global community
HC gives the clubs the option to connect in the central online community run on Slack. Attendees of the physical club meetings are encouraged to share their creations and experiences there. Showing off the work with other members in this community creates extra opportunities to get feedback faster, interact and find a place among a global pool of members. The design of the community’s communication platform almost urges its users to share their workings, discuss topics of interest and interact on a regular basis, as there are dedicated chat channels for these activities. On top of that, members can create their own channels of choice with little restriction, so the platform is flexible enough for the members' needs. There are 4400 public channels at the time of writing this essay.
We’ve already shown how the community connects coding clubs. It may be a little hidden that the community is open to individual learners with no connection to real-life coding clubs. The central community can be interpreted as a certain safe place which is large enough and has a sufficient number of users so that students can freely experience learning in a live network and build their own identity in it. The member moves within certain security guarantees of support, feedback, socialisation and rituality which are not commonplace on the Internet. In this sense, the community offers an interesting open environment for students of various cultural backgrounds and needs, which is part of their values since the beginning of the organization.
One of the most interesting aspects of the community for me as an individual learner is the momentum the community gains as it grows, which means an increased likelihood of creating learning opportunities hardly any other community offers. With more users, the probability of getting intrinsic and authentic feedback on learners’ work grows. This goes in hand with the identity of the organisation which given its size, funding, marketing and history establishes more communication channels for learning in semi-connectivist way, connecting learners to interesting learning opportunities such as meeting interesting people.
One of the biggest struggles of online communities in general is their sustainability over prolonged periods of time. Intuitively, communities thrive with a shared sense of purpose and meaningful activities around it. In an educational community like Hack Club, building and maintaining a sense of belonging is key. Interestingly enough, they cover common dimensions of sociability as discussed in the literature [9]–[11]. The most important part of the solution is the members of the organization’s close team, who are regular members and act as regular members of the community, thus strengthening the community’s culture when it comes to sharing learning journeys and keeping the community’s rituals alive. Backing the community with a professional team that supports its culture and ensures it’s working, as Hack Club does, is in my opinion a critical thing that many similar communities lack and therefore struggle to keep the community’s momentum.
Infrastructuring and product thinking
The organisation builds its finance infrastructure product called Hack Club Bank which exposes transparent bank accounts specifically designed for the clubs and possibly other nonprofit communities the NGO can patronise. The rest of the provided tooling contains methodologies, workshop materials and tools to run successful coding clubs and arrange meetings and workshops. This way, the founding members of new clubs do not need to invest extra time to develop their materials since can reuse the best practices instead. Many more products are being developed as part of the infrastructure for the community and are published under open-source licenses. Members of the community are encouraged to join their development or ship their own products. Developing tools and services tailored for the community makes the community’s member’s experience more refined as all the tooling helps with their specific problems and share its visual identity. Other products developed under the organisation are Sprig — a programmable game console, Scrapbook — a student learning diary on top of Slack, and Sinerider — a math puzzle game.
Conclusion and personal reflection
I regularly seek online communities when I struggle with a problem or when I want to deep dive into a new field. I see the collapse of traditional relationships based on geographical location or destiny’s random co-occurrences as one of the major changes brought by the internet. While the concept of onlife suggests we no longer differentiate between online and offline, popular memes of a man standing in the corner at a party saying “They don’t know I am X” show there is an important schism between being online and offline. While offline fails to keep up with the online world, offline communities enable deeper interactions over shared goals compared to online settings. Unfortunately, most online communities seem flat compared to the interactions I am used to experiencing in a physical setting. It’s very hard to balance meaningful interaction over shared goals with the time spend interacting with the communities to get the expected result and it’s very hard to get the right feedback at the right time in online communities that are too small. Hack Club manages to overcome these pitfalls.
I initially followed the organisation’s actions as part of my research with no goal of writing this essay. As I engaged with the community and fell in love with the community’s values, I realize there is a preoccupation in my view now. One of my biggest realizations is how impersonal communication is when it comes to sharing a learning journey on social media which is not designed for this specific thing. I also realized how rarely I engaged with an outer global world as part of my study at university. There is much more to be discussed about the community. For example, the organisation’s stated values and philosophy predefine interactions within the learning community in an interesting way which could be observed for research purposes.
Overall, I think the community succeeds in empowering the students thanks to their values and principles, size and marketing. The identity of the community plays an important role in empowering students. I personally tried to invite a founder of a big public company for an interview on behalf of Hack Club’s identity, being given the organisation’s support. Contacting the person on my own or even using my university’s name would mean a decreased likelihood of success. And even though the interview did not happen yet, the experience of performing the action of writing the email and contacting the person was unexpectedly forming for me. It is also good to see community nurturance based on leading by example and inspiration that requires active and authentic people’s work. It creates an enjoyable environment for sharing personal learning journeys with the community. As I already stated, I would recommend the community to everybody either for research purposes or for participation in the community in the name of learning.
References
[1] W. Hudgins, M. Lynch, A. Schmal, H. Sikka, M. Swenson, and D. A. Joyner, ‘Informal Learning Communities: The Other Massive Open Online “C”’, in Proceedings of the Seventh ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale, Virtual Event USA: ACM, Aug. 2020, pp. 91–101. doi: 10.1145/3386527.3405926.
[2] A. Nandi and M. Mandernach, ‘Hackathons as an Informal Learning Platform’, in Proceedings of the 47th ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science Education, Memphis Tennessee USA: ACM, Feb. 2016, pp. 346–351. doi: 10.1145/2839509.2844590.
[3] J. Warner and P. J. Guo, ‘Hack.edu: Examining How College Hackathons Are Perceived By Student Attendees and Non-Attendees’, in Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research, Tacoma Washington USA: ACM, Aug. 2017, pp. 254–262. doi: 10.1145/3105726.3106174.
[4] M. Zhu and C. J. Bonk, ‘Designing MOOCs to Facilitate Participant Self-monitoring for Self-directed Learning’, OLJ, vol. 23, no. 4, Dec. 2019, doi: 10.24059/olj.v23i4.2037.
[5] A. Glassner and S. Back, ‘Psychological and Sociological Aspects of Heutagogy’, in Exploring Heutagogy in Higher Education, Singapore: Springer Singapore, 2020, pp. 49–57. doi: 10.1007/978–981–15–4144–5_4.
[6] L. M. Blaschke, ‘Self-Determined Learning: Designing for Heutagogic Learning Environments’, in Learning, Design, and Technology: An International Compendium of Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, M. J. Spector, B. B. Lockee, and M. D. Childress, Eds., Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2016, pp. 1–22. doi: 10.1007/978–3–319–17727–4_62–1.
[7] R. M. Ryan and E. L. Deci, ‘Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being.’, American Psychologist, vol. 55, no. 1, pp. 68–78, 2000, doi: 10.1037/0003–066X.55.1.68.
[8] G. Branwen, ‘Conscientiousness & Online Education’, Jul. 2012, Accessed: Jun. 21, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://gwern.net/conscientiousness
[9] E. Rietveld, S. de Haan, and D. Denys, ‘Social affordances in context: What is it that we are bodily responsive to?’, Behav Brain Sci, vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 436–436, Aug. 2013, doi: 10.1017/S0140525X12002038.
[10] C. J. Kreijns, Sociable CSCL environments: social affordances, sociability, and social presence. Maastricht: Datawyse boek- en grafische producties, 2004.
[11] K. Kreijns and P. A. Kirschner, ‘Designing Sociable CSCL Environments: Applying Interaction Design Principles’, in What We Know About CSCL, J.-W. Strijbos, P. A. Kirschner, and R. L. Martens, Eds., Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2004, pp. 221–243. doi: 10.1007/1–4020–7921–4_9.
