physics homework help discord

physics homework help discord

The Role of Online Platforms in Physics Education: A Case Study of Discord

1. Introduction

While the potential of this interaction is enticing, it is very little researched. The majority of academic work is theoretical. Heitzmann, in a paper on the use of free web applications in the classroom, suggests that course blogs and discussion forums are beneficial because “teaching is not merely a sequence of independent classes – at the level of a course or an entire curriculum, classes are connected with shared goals and syllabi and entire classes have a common experience through the standard use of a textbook.” His focus on a real-world experience connecting learners within and across classes speaks to the power of connectivity and shared experience. Physics educators have also embraced platforms as a means for young scientists to connect. In this case, the shared goal and common experience of physics centers on popular science writing.

One of the greatest changes online platforms have created for formal education is the possibility of a dramatically larger pool of resources and platforms. Edge’s 2012 review of platforms, which is dated but the last known global report of platforms, identified around 286 course platforms. Of the platforms listed, many provide eLearning courses, assessments, and/or discussion tools. Allowing learners to connect via forums, chatrooms, and social networks has become a popular choice among educators as it creates shared experiences so learners can learn together. Chechnya and Mancabelli argue that schools “desperate for innovation” are drawn to social media platforms such as Facebook, Google Docs, and Twitter because they are “free, and groovier, and a lot more flexible than their IT departments.” But the authors are skeptical of this approach. Optimal are spaces that include “curated forums and chat rooms, peer-to-peer mini-lessons, curated resource repositories, [and] discussion and agenda-setting tools.”

2. The Benefits of Online Platforms for Physics Education

The disparities in accessibility, availability, and knowledge of students are exacerbated by the obligations and difficulties of traditional education and online teaching and communication structures. Large class sizes make it difficult for instructors to notice or attend students who face trouble. Although many platforms emphasize adaptability, the use of advanced education and education features makes them too complicated for instructors to combine with standard education because advanced education and many social networking features ignore the specific topic of conventional education. Physics teaching calls for knowledge and networking, which does not require the complexity of a wide variety of social networking capabilities. Discord is an online social platform and multi-screen communication tool that was formally created for online game communities, making it particularly attractive to physics education communities who require complicated theoretical input and support. Discord comes with various favorable characteristics for users.

Physics education can be considerably enhanced by many different facets of online platforms, such as flexibility, user-friendliness, accessibility, and multi-function ability. They can be used not only to help individual students/teachers but also to lower participation pressure for individual teachers, making it exceptionally useful for educational writing and curriculum consulting. Platforms with communication and networking functions are particularly valuable, especially in the difficulty of physics, which depends on various multidisciplinary abilities. This is consistent with the value of formal learning, emphasizing learning as a social and collaborative course. We believe that most, if not all, physicists will benefit students by adapting to the new study environment to study online. In order to focus our work, we selected Discord for this study.

3. Case Study: How Discord Enhances Physics Homework Help

This chapter explores one particular online learning platform – Discord – that can support students in physics, specifically by providing a space for students to help each other complete homework and ask questions. Discord is designed to support communities engaging in gaming, but the study sample uses Discord in a different way – as a platform for large communities of students. These communities are built around large Discord servers, and the study sample uses a subset of the Discord server for homework assistance in physics. The space for homework help is a dedicated channel within the Discord server. Students can only ask homework questions during the study hall hours (Monday through Friday, 5:30 to 8:30 pm). During the study hall, a dedicated team of experienced undergraduate Learning Assistants (who are physics majors) and graduate students in physics responds to questions. They typically provide students with help in the form of questions, hints, or nudges. Additionally, if students would like feedback on scratch work or a draft of their solution, they are invited to submit their work through a Google Form, at which point members of the Physics Course Hub Team (Current Physics Instructors, Learning Assistants, and Graduate Teaching Assistants) consider the form to provide a detailed look at their work. Due to the large volume of submissions, feedback requests are currently closed during the first week of the semester (the chapter was written in the second week of classes during the Spring 2022 semester). Students have the opportunity to interact with other students on the Discord server to discuss the questions in real-time. In this way, the space is designed to help students break larger problems down into smaller, more manageable pieces, while also allowing for some forms of synchronous and asynchronous one-to-one communication.

To survey how different online platforms are used in physics education, let us consider in this chapter a case study. We examine a large Discord server with more than 33,000 members, focusing on a dedicated study hall and specific physics channels in which physics instructors provide homework help and feedback on student solutions. Our analysis of how Discord is used opens future research directions into how similar spaces are beneficial as online social learning platforms.

4. Challenges and Solutions in Using Discord for Physics Education

What follows is an assessment of these complaints and recommendations emerging from our online consultation. It incorporates material from a workshop session on Discord which took place in February 2022 at the Applied Physics Lab. DESIGN Conference. Tellingly, the most extensive discussions among the focus group members of the strengths and weaknesses of Discord — indeed, the very point that they named its exercises “Proving [Ground]s” or “Testing Grounds” rather than “Workshops”, “Experiments”, “Chancellery”, or “Symposium” — took the platform itself as the focus of debate. Here we wish to underline that which has been passed over or left unexamined: namely, the very matter of “for what” and in which ways Discord might be utilized effectively during the present crisis for physics education, and, more generally, “in general”.

While Discord proves useful to many physics teachers and students, the experience is not universally positive. Indeed, our focus group participants shared a number of points of friction with it. It is to these points that we now turn, in order to take stock of some of the practices recommended by its users and to assess how Discord might (not) be made to work for the purposes of physics education. Participants’ feedback, captured in the form of documentation of discussions and translations of the posters seen by conferencegoers — or, in the case of the workshop, outcomes of online breakouts into whiteboard — suggests a range of potential problems. For educators, these may include coordination challenges, questions of access, control and credibility as they arise in relation to server functionality and moderation, cognitive load, and the dynamics of timed discussions. For students, they reported varying levels of buy-in to Discord as a platform, due to its interface and space-shaping, its 24-hour functionality, and concerns with issues of discovery and illegibility. Finally, the wider context within which any educator or student operates subject to or in resistance against educational and institutional norms must also be addressed.

5. Conclusion and Future Directions

To this point, we have used a specific case study to make a larger point about the future of physics education. In closing, we offer several additional recommendations, focal points for future work, and potential improvements in light of this case study and build upon its insights. First, it is important to undertake further research that investigates the practices of users on Discord that fall outside of break times and study support networks. This would involve the analysis of physics discussions that take place in less supportive environments; for example, hallways, coffee shops, and asides in group study sessions. Second, we have noted that a small number of students go on to contribute four or five relevant ‘talk moves’ over subsequent days, while the overall number of users actually increases from the timing of the first interaction to the results discussion. We suggest this might point to a discussion effect in the early stages of the debate that motivates discussion at results time. It is apparent that more research is required in order to understand the precise implications of this, or in order to assess more fully the effects of debating students for those who also take part in the study support area of our case study.

Future Directions

This perspective describes the ways in which online platforms are already playing a role in the practice and culture of physics. At the heart of this essay is a case study that explores these themes through a particular lens: that of the pervasive text and voice chat platform, Discord, which currently hosts an active community of physics undergraduate students. We wish to underline four key points that are instrumental to our overall thesis that online platforms ought to be more broadly harnessed in service of physics education. First, it is important to discuss whatever activities students take part in outside the conventional bounds of curriculum. Viewed through the lens of activity theory, students’ activities in physics discord servers have the potential to reveal students’ motives, their conceptions, their knowledge, and their values as they pertain to the discipline and practice of physics. Second, the social dynamics of such servers merit investigation due to their potential to shape students’ experiences of physics. The case study provides insight into the social spaces such servers engender, and the ways in which students use them. Third, we contend that a close look at users’ messages can reveal the types of physics-related activities in which they are engaged. The debate concept, resource, problem statement, encouragement and world talk moves we describe in Section 3 serve as key touchstones that illuminate permits scholars (and those practitioners who are so inclined) to sensitize themselves to the activities in which students engage. Fourth, when seen through the lens of knowledge, a fine-grained textual analysis of server communication can inform our understanding of the explicit and implicit knowledge shared by its users.

Conclusions