What makes a course like 23 Things go viral?

Abstract

The “23 Things” course model has gone from a small US library to Oxford, Cambridge, Melbourne, and New Zealand. The 23 Things programme has gone viral in that over 500 public iterations have been recorded globally since 2006, each one adapted to the organisation's needs, and it continues to spread. This paper considers the features that have lead to this growth in the context of our own experience running 23 Things for Research for staff and doctoral students and 23 Teaching Things for student teachers at the Faculty of Education and Social Work of the University of Auckland.

23 Things offers online, self-paced, à la carte learning. It is delivered via blog posts and related digital communication tools. The activities scaffold learners to apply the learning by creating artefacts that are relevant for their contexts, and reflecting on how those artefacts might be used in their practice. 23 Things curates free, open source content and is Creative Commons licensed to freely share and repurpose for non-commercial gain. Success is reflected in the participants' reports of their increased confidence and ability, the formation of professional learning communities, and the subsequent spread to new contexts and audiences.