Finding Joy in Learning Through Community

By Charlie Miller, PhD, CVP of Social Learning at Microsoft and Founder of Flipgrid

If you dig into the definition of learning you’ll find unique interpretations — “the acquisition of knowledge” or the act of “studying, practicing, being taught.” Through this lens, learning can seem transactional — a job to be done.

Yet watch someone who has just played their first guitar chord, spoken their first sentence in a new language, captured their first photograph, or perfected their “Meatless Monday” souffle recipe, and you see something different. You see joy.

To learn is to invest in our passions and with each new lesson or skill we gain, a step further in becoming a better version of ourselves. It’s an experience our brains are designed to enjoy, releasing dopamine at the thrill of gaining a new skill. When we learn, our brains have the same chemical reaction as when we fall in love, and just as our bodies respond to physical activity and conditioning, our brains become healthier with practice.

The only thing that makes the experience better? Community.

Learning — at its best — is a social, creative, challenging, and collaborative experience that brings us joy.

This simple notion that learning can be both collaborative and joyful, where the messy middle of learning can be embraced in a safe group of your peers, was the springboard for a startup idea we had nearly ten years ago — an app today known as Flipgrid. I wanted to stay more deeply connected to my Ph.D. students while teaching online, and, more importantly, I wanted to help them see the value of their learning connections with each other. So, with a small group we built a simple mission: to empower learners to share their voices and respect the diverse voices of others. To learn together through a shared messy middle.

Today, some of those same students remain as leaders on my Flipgrid team at Microsoft, and the platform that I hoped a half dozen people might find useful is now used in 190 countries around the world and has compelled people to share more than seven billion videos with their learning communities.

I wake up each day humbled by the success of a startup that began with a simple idea, a few big thinkers, and a logo sketched on a napkin. How did we come so far, so fast? Perhaps because my experience with my students was in fact a universal truth that had simply not yet been tapped into.

There is perhaps no better example of this truth than the collective learning journey we all went on and continue on today as a result of the global pandemic.

We found ourselves separated from the people and places that made up the fabric of our lives.

We searched for new ways to feel fulfilled and connected.

And the silver lining: we began to learn together and pursued many of the challenges and hobbies we’d lacked the time and space to explore before.

We baked, exercised, binged on Netflix, and made our way through stacks of books. We wrote poetry, took photographs, discussed our shared experience, and comforted one another. We felt in these moments of discovery that we were all still moving forward. We found joy in communities that shared our passions and goals.

And our Flipgrid community — as they always had — inspired us by using the app in ways we’d never imagined. We saw Flipgrid weddings and celebrations of life, karaoke competitions, cub scout projects, book clubs, pregnancy journals, and so much more. Small business owners, rattled by the closures of their storefronts, used Flipgrid to retrain employees for their new digital and remote ways of working. In London, doctors collectively took the Hippocratic Oath on Flipgrid and graduated to serve a world in dire need of their newfound skills. The Special Olympics shared messages of love and support with their inspiring athletes. Our global Flipgrid community was connecting with each other in innovative and unexpected ways.

We saw transformation in classrooms as well. Educators used Flipgrid to support and train one another as they were thrust into a remote learning environment. They began focusing their Flipgrid topics on compassion, global citizenship, and social and emotional well-being— subjects that were more important than ever for their displaced and disconnected classrooms.

Laura Davies, an educator whose students live on a small remote island in Alaska, used Flipgrid to connect her classroom halfway around the world to South Korea. Together they found that despite their language and cultural differences, they had a shared experience and empathy for one another. When Claudia Daniels learned that her husband had experienced a stroke and would need to be hospitalized for an extended period of time, she created a Flipgrid group to share updates with her friends, family, and church community.

Miles apart — even worlds apart — we watched as people connected, shared, supported one another, and moved forward together, and we saw our next chapter.

Our Flipgrid community taught us that to move forward and find joy together, we don’t need another social network. We need safe, curated, and curious communities of people who share our passions and support us in those messy middles of our learning journeys. We need cohorts that value failure with the shared goal of learning forward — without judgement.

The world needs social learning communities where we can share what we love, learn what we want, and be who we are.