ТИКТОК, РИЛС: ВЛИЯНИЕ УЧЕБНЫХ ВИДЕОРОЛИКОВ ИЗ СОЦИАЛЬНЫХ СЕТЕЙ НА ОБУЧЕНИЕ В РЕАЛЬНОЙ ЖИЗНИ

TIKTOK, REELS: THE IMPACT OF TEACHING VIDEOS TO A REAL-LIFE TEACHING
Kussainova A., Talas B., Sagadatova N., Ospanov R., Tolegenov I.
Astana IT University, Astana, Kazakhstan
ТИКТОК, РИЛС: ВЛИЯНИЕ УЧЕБНЫХ ВИДЕОРОЛИКОВ ИЗ СОЦИАЛЬНЫХ СЕТЕЙ НА ОБУЧЕНИЕ В РЕАЛЬНОЙ ЖИЗНИ
Кусаинова А.,Талас Б., Сагадатова Н.,Оспанов Р.,Толегенов И.
Astana IT University, Астана, Казахстан

ABSTRACT

The article is devoted to the actual topic — the influence of usage of social network teaching methods in education on popular platforms such as TikTok or Instagram. The authors explain what is meant by learning through social media, its general principles and advantages over classical methods of learning. It is determined that learning through social media is a promising way to transfer knowledge to a younger generation. Besides that, the flaws of such an approach were also taken into account.  Based on the survey of students and the results of the analysis of learning accounts in social networks, the effectiveness of practical use, the extent of impact on learning, depth of understanding of the subject and the acquisition of narrowly focused knowledge by students was defined. As a result of the study, it was concluded that social networks are an excellent tool for «selling» knowledge and developing the personal brand of the teacher, though it still plays more of an entertainment role than a teaching one. As a result, based on a sample of students, there is still a doubt on the importance of the role of instructional videos on social media.

АННОТАЦИЯ

Статья посвящена актуальной теме — влиянию использования методов обучения социальных сетей в образовании на популярных платформах, таких как TikTok или Instagram. Авторы объясняют, что понимается под обучением через социальные сети, его общие принципы и преимущества перед классическими методами обучения. Определено, что обучение через социальные сети является перспективным способом передачи знаний подрастающему поколению. Кроме того, учитывались и недостатки такого подхода. На основе опроса студентов и результатов анализа учебных аккаунтов в социальных сетях определена эффективность практического использования, степень воздействия на обучение, глубину понимания предмета и приобретение студентами узконаправленных знаний. В результате исследования был сделан вывод, что социальные сети являются отличным инструментом для «продажи» знаний и развития личного бренда преподавателя, хотя все же играют скорее развлекательную роль, чем обучающую. В результате, исходя из выборки студентов, все еще есть сомнения в важности роли обучающих видео в социальных сетях.

Keywords: social media in education, teaching methods, education, online technology, Tik Tok, Instagram Reels, learning tool, innovative approach, Student’s t-test

Ключевые слова: социальные сети в образовании, методы обучения, образование, онлайн-технологии, Tik Tok, Instagram Reels, инструмент обучения, инновационный подход, критерий Стьюдента

Introduction

Nowadays, many people, including teachers, are infected with the idea of a personal brand. Many of them want to build their personal brand, which involves setting up social networks and being active on them. There are also a large number of educators, including in Kazakhstan, who are creating entertainment videos or educational videos in such format on TikTok. As young teachers, we wonder whether this really has a learning effect and teachers should allocate energy and time to it or whether such videos are overrated and their effect is only to entertain students.

The object of the study is the influence of videos on the entertainment and leisure internet platforms in the field of education.

Correlation between students’ interest in the subject and educational videos on social networks related to that subject was investigated. To get more precise results the mathematical analysis by giving a hypothesis and verifying it was implemented. Particularly, the calculations were performed using Student’s t-test with Student’s t-distribution under the null hypothesis.

To use statistical hypothesis tests it was necessary to obtain data that can show if our sample data is the same before and after watching educational videos on social networks. To get this data forty high school students from one of the STEM schools in Astana were questioned regarding chemistry before watching the educational video and after. In addition, 40 randomly selected students from grades 9 to 11 were interviewed regarding their interest in teacher’s accounts.

Analysis of several teaching accounts

No doubt, TikTok is one of the most widely used applications in 2022. A recent study, conducted by Statista, has shown us that 61% of users are young people between 10 and 29 years old only in the US. Obviously, with monthly active users equal to 1 billion people, TikTok attracted the attention of content makers in almost all areas of leisure including education. Let’s take a closer look at the most successful educational accounts.

We used social media algorithms to get those accounts by creating a new account and following already famous teachers in Kazakhstan. The algorithm suggested more accounts with educational content since it is targeting accounts by their interest or by what they are following and «liking».

We will review three accounts that will represent three classifications of educational accounts on TikTok. The first one is personal teaching TikTok, people behind these accounts are making videos with their own equipment, whether it is a piece of paper and marker for math or chemistry classroom equipment for demonstrating chemical experiments. All those people conduct their classes personally and usually are working as teachers or professors at educational institutions in their spare time.

We do not know @nilered’s real name. This person has one of the widely known chemistry educational accounts on TikTok with 10,5 million followers. He conducts various bewitching chemical experiments with different outcomes. His videos are popular because of the level of directing and sterility of the video itself. After all, TikTok is a video platform and half of the success of the content depends on how the video was presented. @nilered has also YouTube (4,6 million followers) and Facebook, Instagram (510 000 followers) accounts, he is not new to the world of content creation. He willingly discusses every video with his followers in the comments section and provides additional educational materials for those who are willing to learn chemistry by supporting him on Patreon.

The second type is an organization account. These accounts, as you can guess by the name, are run by media companies that usually already have infrastructure aimed at education or media education. Often it is universities or scientific facilities, but in our case, scientific journal and media creator National Geographic also known as @natgeo at TikTok. National Geographic being a fairly large company, means sending their content creators to the least discovered places on earth and letting their photographers hunt the rarest prey for photo shooting. Such content is very expensive to maintain and TikTok is not the best place to make a profit from it. Therefore the videos on the NatGeo account are usually a snippet of bigger reportage or even a documentary movie that can be found across the web. But even so, those snippets represent the best parts of movies and become powerful educational tools on their own.

The last and probably not the least type is a scam or advertisement educational account. As an example of this type, we will use observe @edubirdie. EduBirdie is a writing platform that offers essay writing for you for the price of 14 quids, besides that they offer educational courses with which the web has been filled in recent years. As a content maker EduBirdie offers pretty decent knowledge, tips & tricks on writing essays, grammar corner cutting, etc. But the main disadvantage of such a content creator is that the videos are usually lame emulations of current TikTok trends just for promotion purposes. Such accounts can offer you new material, but unless you for some reason reject using Google on how to write an essay, such content creators won’t bring you anything new to offer.

Now to the similarities of educational accounts, we will be discussing only the first two types of content creators due to the reasons listed above. Both creators have magnificent content, they aim at gathering the audience’s attention by means they can control which is: the topic of content, directing and presenting, and feedback. Both accounts have sorted their videos into playlists for the viewers’ sake. But unfortunately, TikTok cannot compete as a monetization platform. Both of the accounts utilize other services as their source of income. Both duplicate their content to that service but continue to use TikTok due to the reason that TikTok is still the most popular application in the world and is a great place for gaining more user contributors.

What can we take from these accounts?

Social media and the worldwide Internet have therefore already impacted every aspect of human life, including education. What advantages can be emphasized from the previously stated cases?

First, social media is an effective instrument for drawing students and other members of the «target audience» to science and education. Since young people use social media primarily for self-entertainment, it is highly unlikely that the audience will be affected by this cutting-edge and interesting method of learning about a variety of academic or scientific topics. Students will gain a new perspective on science as they discover fun and engaging ways to solve math problems or witness astounding chemistry demonstrations. The contrast between dry lessons and interesting content on social media can draw the attention of young people to the subject.

Second, social media is a cost-free source of information. The emergence of the Internet as a worldwide network and the exponential growth of information has had a profound effect on education. By utilizing current information and communication technology in the classroom, entirely new teaching methodologies have evolved. Teachers take part in yearly professional development seminars to learn and implement new techniques. Unfortunately, not all areas have reliable Internet access, and not all schools have advanced teaching tools. Social media can therefore be a great replacement for contemporary education. It is an easily accessible and practical tool for staying current.

Students’ response analysis.

The anonymous questionnaire was distributed among students where they were asked if they are interested in “qualitative analysis” in chemistry starting from 1-not interested at all, 2 — slightly interested, 3 — interested moderately, 4 — interested, but I will not look up other resources to get more information, 5 — interested and I will look up other resources.

Figure 1.

They were also asked to watch the video where a famous TikTok teacher in Kazakhstan, @wanna_be_teacher, explains qualitative analysis of chemical elements by comparing anime with chemistry (https://www.instagram.com/tv/CcSwTA0DIaa/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=). After that, the students were prompted to fill out the same questionnaire with the rating regarding their interest in the topic: 1-not interested at all, 2 — slightly interested, 3 — interested moderately, 4 — interested, but I will not look up other resources to get more information, 5 — interested and I will look up other resources.

Figure 2

From the Figure2 it can be seen that rating 5 (interested and I will look up other resources) has increased, but it is still not obvious if there is any correlation between watching these videos and increasing interest in the subject. This is where statistics and mathematical analysis come into play.

Samples are not independent because they are influenced by a certain factor and their influence is unknown, or the samples are data obtained before and after a certain experiment. In this case, Student’s t-test is the best fit.

Two hypotheses to check were formed:

H0 — mean values of two samples are equal and thus there is no effect of watching educational videos

H1 — mean values of the two samples are equal and thus there is an effect of watching educational videos

α=0.05 significance level is in use (this gives us 95% of confidence in our hypothesis), taking into account the degrees of freedom L1 = 40 — 1, L2 = 40 — 1.  The formula that used to get t criteria is  where is the average between the difference of samples, n is 40 students, and  is the standard deviation of sample differences. Research showed that t=0,034898518 and Student’s t(critical) = 2,33; thus t<t(critical) meaning that h0 can be accepted (mean values of two samples are equal and thus there is no effect of watching educational videos) with significance level α=0.05. However, the number of students is not enough to get to a conclusion about the effect of the social network. So we suppose that short videos on social networks do not give a deep knowledge, nor raise interest of students to the subject, since they keep scrolling videos and do not go further to other resources to get more information. However these videos can be used at the lessons directly to intrigue and motivate students

Conclusion

In conclusion, it can be said that social media in education is one of the completely new and previously unused methods of learning. This method promotes the exchange of information between students, increases the motivation of students for learning activities, and stimulates the development of creative abilities and cognitive interests. Observation of TikTok allows to conclude that social networks are a great platform to attract students and youth, as the format of short and bewitchingly interesting memorable videos is magnetic to young people. In a short time, you can get accurate information on the topic of interest to students. Since many students do not want to read the material written with a large number of words for a long time or are lazy, a simple learning format will help them better memorize and assimilate the material. In addition, free time contributes not to watching meaningless, empty videos, but to obtain the knowledge he needs at some point. However, as it was demonstrated in the survey of students, teaching them using social networks does not affect the increase in the level of learning. This is due to the fact that in short videos it is impossible to convey such deep knowledge as learning from a book, and there are no guarantees about the accuracy of the information in the video. It is obvious, social networks are not the main tool of online learning, but their capabilities in solving educational problems cannot be ignored, and what is also false is that the education through social networks is completely ineffective. Social networks can be effectively used in each lesson to interest students, draw their attention to the lesson. The main goal is to arouse interest in studying among the younger generation and teenagers who spend a lot of time with gadgets in their hands.

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