Overview

Recently, a lot of people have been having challenges studying alone and some have been asking if joining a community to study is a must to understand basic concepts in Tech World, well it is not compulsory to be in a community to perform very well in Tech but it’s a necessity. As it has a lot of advantages and importance. In this article, I will explain more about Tech Community learning.

What is Tech community learning?

Tech community learning is a small group or cohort of students who share common academic goals and work collaboratively in the classroom with one or more professors. Simply means a group of people (experienced and inexperienced) that share knowledge for the sole reason of imparting knowledge. Self-paced learning does have advantages too but it’s better and preferable to get knowledge from people who walked past through the road you are traveling in your tech journey. Tech Community is more like a manual that guides your steps, most especially if you're a newbie in Tech. To understand the field you're going into and materials to read from experienced people Tech Community will make the search more convenient and straightforward for such an individual. Although, someone might say I will get such information from the internet if I do more research. Oh yes! That’s also true but will you be able to ask questions and get swift responses from the people? You can send a message and not get your reply for weeks or probably months, as they too have a lot of messages to attend to, but if you're in a community learning platform it opens room for correction or critics from experienced people. Just like Helen Keller said

Alone, we can do so little; together, we can do so much– Helen Keller.

IMPORTANCE OF COMMUNITY LEARNING

Networking Networking is a powerful tool, especially when used wisely in the Tech world, it opens a lot of doors that hard work can’t, networking with the right people is the right step to take. From networking with people, you can get recommended for huge gigs, that probably hard work can’t. You also get the chance to share ideas with people in experienced fields. This is why in community learning a lot of people make sure that they network with most people they come across on the learning platform.

Communication Community learning helps people in the group to be comfortable enough to communicate, it makes the learning more interactive. I understand that most people don’t like a crowd when studying which is why Community learning doesn’t have a fixed amount of people that can study as a group. It can be from 5 people to 10, it doesn’t have a fixed number. You can decide to have 5 people in your study group for someone who can’t manage the crowd of people during learning. that way you can communicate often about tasks given It opens doors for free and fair communication, you get to hear other people’s opinions.

Discipline So far, discipline has played a lot of roles in success in most people's careers. Like I said earlier deadlines can make someone do a task even when he/she doesn’t feel like it. For example, Emmanuel has deadlines to meet up, deadlines from the instructor of the community, which he tries to ignore but the pressure from the course coordinator becomes too much for him that he decides to submit the assignment fast, but Favor on the other hand who learns self-paced postpone his assignment because of it’s in his capacity to submit anytime he like which can be in months or years to come.

Participate in Conference: As a member of a Tech community, you get the opportunity to attend conferences, where you learn more, ask more depth questions from experienced people all over the world, and network too as earlier mentioned. At most conferences, you get a certificate of participation which can serve as an added advantage to your cv/experience level.

TO PARTICIPATE IN COMMUNITY LEARNING YOU HAVE TO POSSESS THE FOLLOWING QUALITIES:

Fixed Mindset: you have to know what you want and be focused on getting it, if you’re to join a community learning platform know that this is what you want to get out of the community, is it to make a lot of connections that tomorrow any job opportunity that comes up you will be recommended to take part in it? Having your goals in mind will make the journey easy and focused for you.

Consistency: Any task that is recommended for you to do, make sure you do it in the group. Consistency has taken a lot of people places that some intelligent people can’t reach today. Not because those people are lazy or don’t have the zeal of making money but it’s because of not doing what they are meant to do constantly. Consistency creates room for improvement, the more you do something the more you get better at it.

We have a lot of communities in Tech you can join, but it's advisable to join the communities related to your field. some are listed below:

Dev. to

SheCodeAfrica

Google Developers Groups

Stack Overflow

GitHub

Stack Overflow

Women Who Code

Diary of Hackers

A lot of factors are tied to Community learning, it‘s like a school but a school where you learn in the comfort of your zone with the principal who is the Creator of the group, the Teacher who is the admin/instructor of the group. Visualize it like that and you will see that it’s a place to be if granted the opportunity.

Thank you for reading!

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