Online but Not Alone: How Belonging Can Catalyze Learning

It’s a typical Sunday evening in late October, and I’ve just arrived in Accra. As my car leaves the airport, I’m frantically trying to get a stable internet connection to join Oyin, one of Kibo’s Student Advisors, on a Zoom call. We are holding our weekly call to discuss and finalize the Squad Cup update. We can already see students refreshing the leaderboard in our Discord server, waiting to see if their submissions for the week have pushed their squad to the top. There might be a mini-rebellion if we don’t move fast. As I am finally able to connect to the call, I am baffled by how we got to this point.

Online programs typically struggle to maintain student engagement and ensure student success. Of course, many factors contribute to this, including student motivation, instructional quality, and academic support. However, an often underappreciated factor is the level of community support and belonging that students feel. In fact, studies have shown that the density of a student’s social network is positively correlated to their academic performance. Without strong social bonds, the absence of face-to-face interaction means students can easily disengage or lose motivation. So, when designing the student experience at Kibo, we placed students in squads of 4-5 to provide them with social support, belonging, and accountability.

However, according to Brian Solis:

Community is much more than belonging to something; it's about doing something together that makes belonging matter.

Therefore, while forming squads was the first step, we knew it was vital for them to do something meaningful together to cement their value. And so the Squad Cup was born.

Designing a Meaningful Online Competition

The Squad Cup is Kibo’s intramural competition between squads. You can think of it as our version of the Hogwarts House Cup. During the term, squads complete activities to win points toward the Cup, and the squad with the most points at the end of each term is crowned the winner. 

Squad Cup activities encourage students to engage with the community, share and apply their knowledge, and interact in real life. Some past activities include:

• Creating a Python assignment for future students (example)

• Publishing a blog post about learnings at Kibo (example)

• Recording a video explaining a topic from a Kibo course (example)

• Participating in a hackathon or coding competition (example)

When we kicked off the Squad Cup, we couldn’t foresee how impactful it would be and how committed some squads would be to the competition. Under the umbrella of the Squad Cup, our founding class published over 20 blog posts about their learnings at Kibo, recorded 50 videos explaining topics they were learning, created 44 novel Python and web development assignments for future students, and visited 10 schools to teach introductory coding; all outside of our formal curriculum.

What We Learned

Like everything else we are experiencing with our founding class, the inaugural Squad Cup was a significant learning experience for the Kibo team. It allowed us to observe student interactions and learn more about their behaviors, responses to challenges, and motivations. For example, while the prizes initially motivated many of them to participate, at some point, it was not just about the prizes but also the community recognition. Additionally, the excitement and inter-squad support created a shared identity that fostered psychological safety.

“I have very wonderful colleagues…They are always supportive and always willing to help you because they see you as part of themselves, and they see your failure as their failure also, so they're always willing to give you their best.” - Damilare

We also learned that:

• Competition rules matter. Participants will always try to game the system, so it is critical to have clear rules and expectations that support your target behaviors and interactions. Make sure you know why you are running the competition, and align the competition rules to that why.

• Actively manage the competition culture. It is important to nip anti-social behavior in the bud as soon as you witness it. What you allow to occur will persist and shape the culture of the competition and community.

• Not all community members will be motivated to participate. Of the 15 squads in our founding class, only 10 participated in the competition. However, non-participants still cheered on others and benefited from what was being created. Therefore, while it is good to broaden participation, it is worth embracing the different ways people interact with the competition. From your champions to your lurkers, everyone can still gain something.

Developing Human Skills for Future-Proof Careers

While community building and student engagement were the primary goals of the Squad Cup, active participants gained another important benefit: the development of critical human skills. Human skills are “nontechnical skills that make rapid learning and adaptability possible across all industries.” These are the sort of skills that help people future-proof their careers, especially at a time when we are all reckoning with the impact of A.I. on the future of work.

The Squad Cup created an authentic context for students to hone a variety of these skills, including:

• Goal Setting and Self-Motivation: The Cup encouraged students to set goals, track progress, and maintain discipline. 

• Teamwork and Collaboration: Working as part of a team in the Squad Cup promoted effective communication and the ability to work towards a common goal. Squads that actively participated in the Cup learned how to leverage their individual strengths, delegate tasks, and cooperate effectively.

• Persistence: The Squad Cup's weekly cadence allowed squads to test out strategies and evaluate outcomes. If their strategy failed one week, they could pivot to a new approach the next week to see if it was more successful. 

• Time Management and Organization: Success in the Cup required juggling multiple tasks, challenges, and deadlines. Squads had to manage their time effectively, set priorities, and organize their efforts to meet the competition requirements. 

• Problem-Solving and Critical Thinking: The mechanics of the Squad Cup meant that squads could only make a limited number of submissions each week. Therefore, they had to analyze the current state of the competition, evaluate options, and devise strategies for which activities were worth their time and effort.

Cultivating these skills within a formal curriculum is possible, and we also do so through our General Education curriculum. However, when students participated in the Squad Cup and discovered how these skills could help them achieve their goal (i.e., winning the Squad Cup), they perceived the skills as more immediately meaningful. Instead of “These are useful skills that will help me to be more employable in the future,” it became “These are skills that I need to get better at right now so we can figure out how to beat that other squad who seem to always be ahead of us in the competition.”

“The school visits helped build my confidence and leadership skills. Some schools turned me down when I reached out to speak to their students. I understand now that I might get turned down, but that shouldn't stop me. I also learnt how to connect to my audience in the way I connected to the students in the school I visited in the east.” - Emmanuel

Learning Beyond the Curriculum

When designing online learning programs, it is tempting to focus solely on the academic experience. Students are busy, and we want to ensure they maximize the time spent engaging with the course materials to achieve our learning objectives. However, we shouldn’t underestimate the power of community and extra-curricular activities in developing the skillsets, mindsets, and networks our students need to thrive. Intramural competitions like the Squad Cup are a powerful avenue for skill development in a context where the stakes are lower, and students have more autonomy. It is not a coincidence that students who actively participated in the Squad Cup were more likely to perform better academically at Kibo.

Finally, the Squad Cup taught us the importance of open-mindedness during experimentation. If you are observing and reflecting while trying to achieve a specific goal, it is possible to notice useful secondary outcomes. The original objective of the competition was to improve student engagement and belonging. However, in achieving that, students improved their technical skills through the assignments they created, developed valuable human skills, and positively impacted their local communities through the school visits. 

As we welcome our second cohort in July, we are taking the lessons from this inaugural competition to design a better version of the Squad Cup that encourages greater community participation and further technical and human skill development.