Disrupting how we 'do' on-line learning through social media: a case study of the crowdsourcing the UK constitution project

Social media and higher education pedagogy have enjoyed a chequered relationship,with significant debates about the efficacy of social media as a site of learning, the manager/host of an individual's learning trajectory and as a tool of facilitating collaborative learning at scale. This paper presents the exploratory findings from the evaluation of Constitution UK,an innovative civic engagement run by the London School of Economics. We argue that some of the behaviours inherent in social media learning (centred on fleeting connections, digital identity and discontinuous engagement) can create the conditions for effective learning and achievement at scale. Through the project we identified a number of challenges that social media as a learning platform and mode of learning itself pose for traditional on-line education including the role of the academic, the transformative effect of harnessing the massive and difficulties in approaching learning design in an unstructured and informal environment.