How COVID 19 changed my view about Facebook and Social Media
Previous to Covid 19, I abhorred social media. In my start ups, whenever I found employees spend time on Facebook, I gave them a look. I even banned them from using facebook and other social media when they were at work.
When I taught students in Coding Dojo, I told students to never use facebook and to cut off all distractions outside of the school, so that they could completely focus their 70–90+ hours each week on the curriculum.
That’s how I viewed social media for more than a dozen years now. My friends even created a facebook account for me, as I didn’t have a facebook account, even after years after everyone was using facebook.
My perspective about social media and how it was really all just a ‘big distraction’ or a “big noise” changed significantly just this week.
How it happened
During Covid 19, as with many people in the world, I was quarantined in my house for weeks. As I was getting extremely bored and missed social interactions, I decided that I am going to do something different: offer a free coding class for my friends and any friends they wanted to invite.
So I created two posts, one in facebook and one in LinkedIn, inviting my friends to join a free coding class I will be teaching online for them. I spent about 2 minutes to draft a message and clicked on ‘Post’.
A few hours later, I came back and checked if anyone signed up. I was blown away when 80 people had already signed up, all within the first few hours. Two days later, I had over 200 people sign up. Then a few days later, I got 400 people and then when my younger sister, who had a big group of followers in Instagram, shared my post, that number basically doubled again.
Eventually I had 850+ people sign up, all within just a week.
I was in awe as I watched 850+ people sign up in such a short amount of time!
“What should I do now?”, was what I was thinking as people kept registering. I decided to create a private facebook group (my sister told me this is a good idea), and started creating lesson plans for the students in my class. This was my first time ever creating a facebook group so the features were all new to me and I initially struggled navigating through all the features within the group.
Class Starts
By the time I started class, I had 400+ people join the facebook group and even children of my friends signed up for the class! It was really neat.
We decided to do a live class each day from 4pm PDT to 5pm PDT but I hosted all the learning materials in Facebook’s ‘Units’ where videos, reading materials, and assignments were posted.
Then the class began and we held our first live class. We had over 100+ people from all over the world join the live class! Many requested to have the video recorded so that they could watch later. We had people from Singapore, Philippines, Pakistan, India, Canada, Mexico, South Africa, and many other parts of the world. It was really really interesting and although we had a technical glitch where I couldn’t find where people were leaving comments, we were successfully able to have our first live class.
The first live class I think was a disaster in hindsight. I was so nervous that I covered too much materials so quickly and overwhelmed a lot of my students. However, people were very supportive and they kept leaving encouraging remarks for me. That was fun, something I never really felt in my other teaching settings where I had students in a room and could interact with them 1:1.
Trying to read comments posted, while setting up my OBS to stream the lectures, and connecting my iPad so that I could draw my on my Ipad and people could see what I am doing, took a lot of research and trial and error to finally get it to work.
Despite all the short-comings I had getting familiar with facebook, how the facebook group worked, as well as how to post things on Facebook with images, videos, etc, it was still a fun and rewarding experience.
Doing live lectures over Facebook Live feed was also interesting and it worked surprisingly well as it automatically recorded the live session and made it available for the students who couldn’t make it on the live lecture time.
How this affected my view as an entrepreneur
What was most fascinating to me was how quickly I would get feedbacks. As an entrepreneur, I was always taught to build something quickly, launch, learn from customers, iterate and repeat the process all over again. I tried to do that with my previous startups and also this lesson was reinforced again when I went to Stanford Graduate School of Business for a year in 2016.
But Facebook allowed me to this in a way that was 10–100 times faster than anything I have ever done in the past. I could simply post a message asking my students what they thought about something (and really anything), and they would give me meaningful feedback within minutes! How quickly I could talk to my real users (my students), get feedback, and iterate was at least an order of magnitude faster than me working with my designers, designing it, then coming up with a prototype, then building it with my team of engineers, and then testing it out in the market.
How quickly I was able to learn, pivot, adjust, and iterate to try to provide the best student experience, all because of Facebook, was absolutely mind-blowing. All the bad things I said about Facebook previous in my career, I started to feel bad and I began to really really enjoy Facebook, particularly how it allowed entrepreneurs and teachers like me to stay very very close to our users/students and communicate in such an efficient manner.
How this affected my view as an educator
I now have mixed feelings about Facebook as an educator. Before Covid 19, as I mentioned, I didn’t want my students to use Facebook at all as it was a big distraction. Now, I still don’t like how Facebook can bring so much noise and distractions, but I can see that there is also a bright side to this, where if the platform was used to leverage the strength of Facebook, its community and the power of real time communication with students, I can also see how Facebook could be used as a powerful tool to educate and connect with our students at a deeper level and also to reach a far wider audience of people we can educate than what we could do in a traditional class room setting.
Concluding Thought
Overall, I am grateful for the experience I had. As in all things in life, what we normally see purely as one side, often have two sides of the story and I feel that I am now seeing the power of Facebook. I still don’t consider Facebook to be the best thing in the world, but at least now I know it’s more than just a “big distraction” or “noise”.
