The advent of new technologies and social networking has made production of new content a fairly routine activity. Each day between 300 and 350 million photos are uploaded on Facebook; YouTube sees the addition of about 300 hours of video per minute. While most of this content can be dismissed as having low intellectual content, and of being of ephemeral interest, this ease of content creation and sharing lends itself well to the creation of meaningful knowledge assets as well. In a way, we see this already – a good part of the 300 hours of video on YouTube uploaded per minute might consist of how-to videos – on everything ranging from highly technical topics to tips on sharpening a pencil. The blurring of lines between formal learning and informal, peer-to-peer learning brings with it a number of new experiences that enhance learning. The ability to learn and share empowers the learner, and drives curiosity. The ability to learn from peers is often less intimidating than learning from “experts” or established “authority figures.”

It is often said that the best way to learn a topic is to teach it; today, this has become easier than ever, with learners having the ability to create their own pieces of content. This also fits in well with the notion of “microlearning” or learning in small “bite-sized” pieces; rather than creating a whole course spanning many hours on, for example, differential calculus, one can now consume or create a short tutorial on solving one specific type of problem.

The downside

This democratization of knowledge creation comes with some obvious caveats. Chief among these is the onus on the learner to be able to verify the quality and accuracy of content. Platforms such as YouTube have no practical way of controlling the quality of educational content that is uploaded; this leads to the obvious danger of misinformation, and there is no easy solution to this issue. Thus, while providing numerous benefits to the learner and enhancing the learning experience, leaners are now burdened with the new role of establishing the reliability of the content they consume.