There are several ways to use Instagram as a teaching and resource tool. In essence, it is a free online space that you can fill with mostly whatever you like. The space that Instagram allows can be filled with all sorts of learning resources. It may not have mass appeal, but it is all the better if it does because your teaching and resource tool may start making money.
Gathering Your Audience
First, you need an audience. That way, if your teaching and resource tool content has a wider use, then your account may become successful, which will help you generate buzz for your learning tools, for your website, and for your brand, If you have one).
Either way, you need an audience of both the people you send to your Instagram account, and you need an audience populated by strangers (aka Instagram users). You need to look for Instagram accounts for sale from online marketplaces. You can see it here for further information. Buy the accounts that other people have grown and use their influence to promote your teaching courses and your content. Help spread the word in the most cost-efficient manner, and make sure to get as many followers as you can without spending too much money on advertising.
Teaching and Learning Through Messages
There are some subjects and some topics where a very clinical academic style is best used. However, there are many other facets of learning and many other subjects where teaching through messages will help learning rather than hinder it.
Let’s say you were teaching diagnostic medicine. You couldn’t put your entire course on Instagram, but you could certainly put up a few messages and questions to get people thinking. You could certainly ask people questions and have them think about the various answers, perhaps even arriving at epiphanies. For example, a message about the effectiveness of a medication, and the combined risks of using it and not using it, could be expressed on Instagram along with perhaps a few statistics to get people thinking.
Questions and Answers
As an extension of the idea above, Instagram uses a carousel system with its images and posts, so why not start with questions and then offer answers. For example, if you post three images on a single post, then the user sees the first image, the second image and then the third (like a carousel image display). The first image could be a question, the second could be a clue, and the third could be the answer. It is similar to having flash cards, except it is a little more in-depth and a little more interactive.
You could load the first image with questions, and then simply leave a space between the first and third image. The third image has the answers. The reason you leave the second image blank, or you put a clue on it, is because sometimes Instagram will show people the second image before the first. This often happens when the second image is the most popular, so Instagram shows it first on your feed. You don’t want people seeing the answers first, so you are better off using three panels (images), and having the last panel be the one with the answers on it.
Offering Up Visual Information
Again, going back to what was mentioned earlier, and taking the diagnostic medicine example, you may consider putting up images of different disease symptoms so that students may recognize them. As you know, various conditions present in a variety of ways, and showing students a visual image of what these things look like are good teaching and learning tools. This doesn’t just apply to diagnostic medicine. You could show a variety of different snakes, perhaps explaining how some look very similar but are in fact very different.
