Everybody Study Club

Hello, it's your friend vrk! I'm creating a club for folks who are out of school but want to continue to learn, particularly through side projects and independent study.

We're going to launch an experimental virtual study club on Discord sometime in March 2021! (...or maybe April, we'll see.)

Interested in joining? Want to help me run it? Or just want to hear updates?

✨ Fill out the interest form! ✨

You'll get general updates on the project and will be notified when the Discord is ready to join.

Coming March 2021: Everybody Study Hall on Discord

For the first version of Everybody Study Club, I want to try to emulate a Drop-In Tutoring Center with a few tweaks:

• This will be an online study hall for people who are not students, but still want to study or work on side projects.
• We'll have a study hall schedule, which will be the time to come on the Discord and lurk in the text or voice chat while you work on whatever you want.
• During study hall, people will be able to ask questions in Discord to "TAs," i.e. experts on the subject you're studying
• For the "TAs", we will hang and answer questions, but during downtime, we'll also work on whatever we'd like.

We're going to try this out on Discord to start! We'll probably make this a ~5 week experiement, after which we'll get feedback and see if we want to continue or make changes.

Sound interesting? 🌟 Fill out the interest form 🌟 and we'll email you when the Discord is ready to join!!

Why a Study Hall approach?

IRL, Drop-in Tutoring Centers are great for both students and TAs alike.

When I was a student, it was nice to do my homework in the drop-in tutoring centers. It was easy to focus in a productive environment, I could make friends with other students in the tutoring center, and I knew if I needed help, I could get help right away from a friendly TA.

When I was a TA working at a drop-in tutoring center, it was really fulfilling work that also required very little prep ahead of time. It was low-pressure because I never worked alone, so if if I couldn't answer a student's question, I could always ask another tutor for help. On top of that, on slow days, I could use that time to do my own homework, or read a book, or chat with the other tutors.

Based on the initial response to the esc interest form, most respondees found motivation to be the most difficult part about self-studying and personal projects (63% of respondees), followed by the ability to ask people questions (32% of respondees).

It seems like something similar to a drop-in tutoring center for folks outside of school might address both of these problems! (Plus, this format requires much less prep for me in comparison to creating and running a course 😄)

Why Discord?

I'd like to be able to hold the study club online, but oof Zoom can be such a stressful space, especially a Zoom full of people who don't know each other very well!

I've really been impressed with Discord and how well it's worked for communities like TTMIK. It also looks like some professors have also used Discord for office hours, utilizing both the text chat and voice chat features. Discord is also free!

It seems like a good platform to start with! We'll give Discord a try for a month or two and then we can reassess.