The Introduction to Environmental Psychology course was taught online due to the COVID-19 lockdown. Students from different locations took two lectures each week over eight weeks through ZOOM. To foster an inclusive learning community, we created a photo-sharing community through Instagram in which all participants could share photos of their surrounding environments and comment on the photos using environmental psychology knowledge they learned in weekly lectures. Instagram is selected as it is one of the top three most used social media platforms among generation Z (i.e., generations whose birth years start from mid to late and end in the 2010s) and an image-based mobile app with features to afford the need to take and share photos from surrounding environments in this learning community. Its key features such as “likes”, and “comments” are also useful to community members’ communication.
Each week, as the lecture addressed different types of environments, the participants posted photos of their surrounding environments at different scales. For example, in week 3, under the topic of Home, “homeyness” and personal space were taught in the lecture. The instructor discussed these concepts broadly regarding definitions, theories, and factors related to the concepts. Then participants posted photos from their surrounding environment on one of the two concepts in the week and briefly explained the post. This way, the participants could apply their knowledge to real-life, familiar contexts.
To understand how this community enhance students’ learning experience, we conductedd survey experiment, interview, and network analysis.
Survey Eeperiment
During the COVID-19 quarantine, we conducted a field-setting pre/post-test randomized experiment (n=115), creating a community using the social media application Instagram to enhance students’ interactions with their peers and immediate physical environments in a large, introductory online course in environmental psychology. We used the framework of the community of inquiry (CoI) to explain the ecological effects of this project. After posting photos and interacting with others on Instagram weekly for 8 weeks, student participants reported a significantly greater social presence and cognitive presence. Furthermore, participants reported higher levels of course satisfaction and performed better on the preliminary exams than non-participants, but this does not seem attributable to the intervention itself. We discuss the issues of self-selection bias, attrition bias, and compliance bias in this study arguing that greater social presence increased the cognitive presence, as mediated by meaningful peer interactions. Our findings provide additional evidence on the value of using social media in educational settings on learning experiences and for building communities to connect students with their peers and physical environments. We also explore the implementation of a pedagogical approach to context-based learning via mobile technologies, and how the CoI framework can be used in evaluating online learning environments.
Interview
We invited 22 students after the study and conducted in-depth interviews. We found that integrating Instagram into the course helped students effectively connect with both real contexts and their peers. The project enhanced participants’ situation awareness by extending remote learning environments to real contexts and formed a sense of belonging through posting, interacting with peers, and browsing profiles and posts. We then proposed a framework of creating a situated learning environment through mobile social media using conjecture mapping to inform design implications and generalize our findings to shed light on future studies in social and mobile learning communities.
Network Analysis
To understand the inclusiveness of the community and students’ perception, we collected their posts by searching designated hashtags and interviewed representatives of participants using a stratified sampling strategy. Through network analysis of 272 posts and qualitative analysis of 8 in-depth interviews, we found that integrating Instagram into online learning could help form an inclusive learning community in terms of gender, ethnicity, and program. The factors related to student participants’ centrality and acceptance were more relevant to whether and how they expressed their identities in the community through posts. We further discussed how our findings could inform the design of inclusive and active communities in the future.
