When Alice E. Marwick, an assistant professor of media studies at Fordham University, assigned her social-media class to create a post on BuzzFeed, the instructions were simple: Go viral.
Several students nailed the assignment, collecting more than 50,000 hits on their listicles and quizzes — BuzzFeed’s bread-and-butter articles. One student devised a quiz on She’s the Man, a quirky romantic comedy from 2006, that surpassed 250,000 page views in mere days, surprising the student and leaving her professor and classmates in awe.
Ms. Marwick is one of several professors using BuzzFeed’s free publishing platform in its community section for class assignments. The section is open to anybody who wants to create a post, and instructors are using it to teach a variety of subjects, including marketing, creative writing, human development, and even the work of the ancient Roman poet Ovid.
Scott Cowley, an assistant professor of marketing at Western Michigan University, first used a BuzzFeed assignment in his marketing class in early 2015, when he was working at Arizona State University. Before making the assignment, Mr. Cowley says he experimented with other platforms, such as LinkedIn and Medium, but none of them could compete with BuzzFeed’s appeal. As a test, he first compiled his own BuzzFeed post, “15 Funny Lines That Somehow Slipped Into a Scientific Journal.” In a week, it collected 75,000 page views.
“That was one of the big eye-opening moments for me,” he says.
Mr. Cowley, whose project won him the Marketing Management Association’s Teaching Innovation Competition last year, said one of his students received a job offer after posting the assignment online. Since then, professors in at least 20 universities have adopted the approach for their marketing departments, he says.
Sarai E. Coba, a doctoral candidate in human development and family studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, saw one of her colleagues using the BuzzFeed assignment in a class and decided to try it out. In Ms. Coba’s course, on the stages of development from infancy through early childhood, she asked students to synthesize one class topic and create a list combination of 10 animated gifs and memes showing that they understood the material.
“It’s a fun way to learn,” she says. “If you’re talking to your neighbor, or you’re talking to somebody who does not have as much education, this is just another way to still provide that information, but just in a different way — and also in a quick way.”
One of Ms. Coba’s students, Taylor Jansen, chose the topic of family planning for her post, illustrated mostly with memes and gifs from the television show The Office. Above one paragraph explaining the high cost of raising a child, a gif of Steve Carell’s character is shown, saying “I declare BANKRUPTCY!”
From Ovid to Taylor Swift
Brett S. Vergara, associate community strategist for BuzzFeed, realized the posts were assignments only when students kept contacting him for technical support.
He says he really can’t distinguish the posts of students from nonstudents, although he welcomes them.
In one notable instance, he says, a high-school teacher who was giving a lesson on Ovid tried to make the case to students that the poet had a style similar to that of the pop singer Taylor Swift. He made the case in a BuzzFeed quiz, and it was featured on BuzzFeed’s home page.
“It got 300,000 views,” Mr. Vergara says.
BuzzFeed, he says, will soon team up with Jennifer Grygiel, an assistant professor of communications at Syracuse University, to teach a social-media course called “BuzzFeed: Future Media Skills.”
“I really hope to see more things like that,” he says, “where we’re in contact with teachers and professors.”
Jonathan H. Holmes, a doctoral candidate in English at Ohio State University, has used BuzzFeed-style assignments for his “Introduction to Shakespeare” class. But he doesn’t use the website because he’s wary of giving away the intellectual property of his students by signing BuzzFeed’s waiver.
But that doesn’t stop others from using it. Mr. Cowley says while some people dislike BuzzFeed for its clickbait style (cute cats and dogs) and fluffy content that caters to readers’ short attention spans, it does have benefits.
“My biggest takeaway from using BuzzFeed is that the digital tools that exist right now are extremely valuable in helping us introduce new and creative ways of engaging our students,” he says. “And sometimes that means looking past our personal biases in order to really understand the potential that the platforms have for creating extremely powerful student experiences.”
