In his book The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg coined the idea of a “third place”: an informal public gathering spot—”cafes, coffee shops, bookstores, bars, hair salons” are the examples he uses in the subtitle of his book—where people form communities. The first two “places,” by contrast, are home and work. A lot of research in recent years has focused on the decline of third places, a phenomenon accelerated by COVID-19. But if the idea of a third place feels unfamiliar, there’s one place to get a sense of their importance: sitcoms.
Every sitcom primarily takes place in one of three places. There are home-based sitcoms like Modern Family and Full House, where most stories revolve around the home. There are work-based sitcoms like Parks & Recreation and The Office, where the action takes place at—well—the office. But some of the most classic sitcoms of all time take place at third places: Friends at a coffee shop, Seinfeld at a diner, Cheers at a bar. The dynamics of a third place allow for a more varied cast of characters, a greater variety of storylines, and a generally more upbeat setting that can sidestep the realities of family and work without suspending disbelief.
In this typology, education occupies an interesting space. From kindergarten through college, education functions as most people’s second place: the full-time, during-the-day activity that eventually is replaced by work. But it clearly plays a massive social role. Research has shown that proximity and unplanned interaction are the foundations of friendship formation, and in few places does that happen more often than school.
But school turns into work. The rising push for lifetime learning—embodied by the explosive growth of part-time, remote online programs—envisions a world where learners return to school on top of their home and work lives. In other words, lifetime learning envisions a world where learning is the third major setting in individuals’ lives. A third place.
At the same time, the role of other third places has been declining. Participation in traditional third-place activities—from bars to religious services—has dropped over the last several decades. And this decline has coincided with the rise of digital social communities. Danah Boyd’s exploration of teenagers’ social media usage explores this: modern society has repeatedly restricted teens’ access to traditional third places, forcing them online. There’s also evidence from dating: research has found that most couples now meet via online dating services instead of through friends, at work, at bars, through family, or at school—those were the top five until 2000, when online dating overtook each of them one by one.
So, that’s the context where we find ourselves now: demand for lifetime learning is at an all-time high. Part of that is the speed of the job market; a lot of emphasis in lifelong learning is on upskilling.
But that’s only part of the equation. Human beings are innately curious, and the internet has made access to knowledge easier than ever. Never before was it possible to pop online after my kids go to bed and think, “You know, I want to learn more about astronomy, or fashion, or beer.”
At the same time, digital environments are already fulfilling our natural need for third places. A lot of that time is currently being spent on doomscrolling, but the ingredients are here for something better: digital education can become a major third place.
I’ve seen this happen. In my day job, I run Georgia Tech’s online MSCS program, which enrolls over 18,000 students this semester from over 140 countries—although 77% are in the US, 10% of whom are actually in Georgia. I’m often asked: how do we solve the challenges that come with such a large student body? How do we create a good experience at scale? But the reality is that the scale is the solution, not the challenge. At this scale, the program takes on a third-place role: students have a massive, always-available community of classmates. The anchor of that interaction may initially be class content—what I’ve elsewhere called a MacGuffin, the stated purpose that gets people in the door—but the real value lies in the proximity and unplanned interaction that fosters friendships.
Lifetime learning and digital education shouldn’t be just about signing up for a self-paced, individualized module that feeds you content at the optimized rate. It should be about joining a community of learners with a shared interest and exploring that interest together, forming relationships along the way.
Maybe that’s why my personal favorite sitcom is one that treats education as a third place: Community. The characters begin as a study group for a Spanish class, but that shared interest is just the anchor for carving out a third place and a social community within it—Community has a double-meaning, referring both to the community college where the show takes place and the community the characters form.
To be frank, though, right now digital education isn’t capitalizing on this need. When you visit any major MOOC platform, the most-featured courses target job skills. edX features courses on AI development and Python programming (which, admittedly, includes my own). Coursera highlights people management and search engine optimization. Even Kadenze, built for creative education, leads with audio plugin development and web design. You can form social learning communities around this content, but it isn’t drawing from the same innate curiosity. For digital education to foster third-place gathering spots, it needs to draw students who want to be there, not who feel they need to be there—and then highlight social connection as a primary part of the experience.
And maybe most importantly, digital education needs to elevate this beyond individual classes. A poignant plotline in Community occurs when the main cast discovers they can’t all take the same course, and it becomes clear they want to because they want to stay together regardless of what they’re learning. Right now, students reach the end of courses. But the magic of this informal community arises when the end of a course does not mean the loss of the place where the community meets.
In our program, a student-run Slack organization now numbers over 25,000 people—alumni, current students, teaching assistants, and even some faculty. When Slack only allowed a free organization to retain its most recent 10,000 messages, messages would purge after only three days due to the volume of activity. Sure, a lot of that was interaction based on courses, but a lot of it is individuals who met because of a shared educational interest and grew to be acquaintances and colleagues and friends.
Digital education should embrace its potential role as a digital third place—grounded on shared interests, but designed to be so much more.
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