How a Spanish Hashtag Grew Into a Multiplatform Teacher Learning Ecosystem

When a university teacher in Spain began interviewing innovative educators live on YouTube in January 2020, she could not have predicted that the experiment would grow into one of the most studied examples of self-directed professional learning in the Spanish-speaking world. The initiative, known as #CharlasEducativas or Educational Chats, began as a hashtag on what was then Twitter, attached to a series of education-related interviews. More than four years later, the project has completed five seasons, hosted more than 650 invited guests across its first four seasons alone, and accumulated over 280,000 views of its chat recordings on YouTube. A new exploratory case study published in the Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research examines how this grassroots initiative evolved into a genuine multiplatform learning ecosystem, and what its trajectory reveals about the future of teacher professional development in an age of ubiquitous social media.

The research team, led by Jeffrey P. Carpenter of Elon University together with Ingrid Mosquera-Gende of Universidad Internacional de La Rioja and Paula Marcelo-Martínez of the University of Huelva, framed their investigation using learning ecosystem theory. Drawing on Bronfenbrenner’s social ecological model and Barron’s concept of learning ecologies, the authors distinguish a learning ecosystem from the more familiar notion of a learning ecology by its focus on a particular system rather than an individual. A learning ecosystem, as Sancho-Gil and Domingo-Coscollola define it, comprises living and non-living components interacting as a system: people, objects, symbols, and physical and virtual spaces, all interwoven and governed by formal and informal rules. Crucially, such ecosystems are dynamic, non-linear, and unpredictable, with mutable and permeable boundaries between their parts. This theoretical lens allowed the researchers to move beyond the single-platform studies that have dominated the literature on educator social media use, in which a 2018 systematic review identified no studies with an explicitly multiplatform focus.

The anatomy of the #CharlasEducativas ecosystem is strikingly complex. At its core remain the live YouTube interview broadcasts, most lasting between one-and-a-half and two hours, in which the founder interviews invited guests, the majority of them primary and secondary school teachers, but also early childhood educators, university faculty, psychologists, families, and learners speaking about their own diversity. Around this core, the ecosystem has sprouted synchronous spaces such as X/Twitter Spaces audio livestreams and occasional Telegram streams, where participants greet one another, answer questions, and debate in parallel dialogues while the host moderates. Asynchronous spaces include the YouTube archive, podcasting platforms, and the Telegram channel, which is used to announce chats, share guest information, and sustain debates between live events. X/Twitter, described by the authors as both the cradle and the nerve center of the initiative, hosted 8,401 original tweets from 1,233 users between January 2021 and June 2023, generating 175,844 likes, with an average of 7.32 posts per contributor.

Among the ecosystem’s distinctive features is the #DebateDominguero, a weekly Sunday poll on X/Twitter addressing educational topics, often those that have attracted substantial social media attention during the preceding week, and, during holidays, personal questions designed to help participants know one another better. Informative spaces, including the dedicated website charlaseducativas.com created to lessen dependence on external platforms, provide archives and calendars without interactive components. Participants have also contributed creatively: one user began producing sketchnotes, graphic summaries of each chat containing key concepts and quotes, complete with an avatar of the founder as a symbol of the community. Beyond the digital realm, the ecosystem crossed into physical space in 2023 with a first in-person event organized with colleagues from the #claustrovirtual community, drawing more than 150 teachers from across Spain for a Saturday of learning and face-to-face reunion; a second event in April 2024 attracted more than 270 attendees.

The ecosystem has even formalized some of its informal learning. Beginning in the third season, the initiative introduced monographs, sequences of consecutive chats devoted to a single topic. A 2022 monograph on Attention to Diversity extended this format and offered participants formal professional certification: by complementing the chat viewings with an open online course run in collaboration with a private education company and volunteer participants acting as informal tutors, teachers could convert informally acquired learning into credentialed value. Social responsibility initiatives further broadened the ecosystem’s scope, including a charity audio-a-thon on X/Twitter Spaces and a merchandise project selling t-shirts, bags, mugs, and sweatshirts designed by teachers, with all profits going to organizations that help children.

To understand what content flows through this ecosystem, the researchers categorized the chat topics into seven groups. Attention to diversity and inclusion emerged as the most frequently featured theme, though a large residual category testified to the sheer variety of subjects addressed, spanning early childhood, primary, secondary, tertiary, vocational, and adult education. Teaching methodologies such as gamification and project-based learning also featured prominently. This breadth contrasts with many online educator spaces that concentrate on a single content area, grade level, or pedagogical approach. The authors suggest that such topical breadth may attract educators with multiple professional interests, and may allow participants to alternate between giving and receiving knowledge as their own expertise becomes relevant at different moments, although they note that some educators may prefer the greater depth offered by more narrowly focused communities.

The third research question probed participant perceptions, drawing on 86 publicly available tweets, open-ended questionnaire responses from 83 teachers collected after the first in-person event, and fragments from a two-hour anniversary video featuring 19 special guests. Two coders independently applied an adapted category system covering educational topics, community building, and format, achieving an interrater reliability index of 0.783, which Landis and Koch’s classification rates as substantial agreement. The analysis generated 252 data units, and the findings clustered around three dimensions: the ecosystem as a source of learning, as a space of community building, and in terms of its formats. Participants valued the initiative as a different way of learning, an opportunity to encounter new points of view, and a context for reflecting on and modifying their own teaching practice. They praised the variety of topics and the quality of guests, and highlighted the ability to watch recordings and listen to podcasts, with some describing the archive as a library of knowledge and experiences.

The community dimension proved especially resonant. Participants repeatedly described the #CharlasEducativas as a family, a network of support that some said they did not find in their physical workplaces. The tone of the exchanges, informal and full of humor, emerged as a defining characteristic. One participant recalled the experience of watching a chat as though sitting down to dinner with the host and the guest, tablet propped in the middle of the table. Another observed that the initiative had achieved something important in both the chats and on X/Twitter, given that social networks are known to harbor hatred, bad manners, and badly managed controversy. The environment was characterized as a safe space for exchange, support, and learning, with acknowledgements directed toward the founder, the guests, and fellow participants, and metaphors describing the founder as a source of community unity.

The study also confronts the fragility inherent in such ecosystems. The maintenance of the live chats has depended largely on a single individual, consistent with prior research showing that informally developed online communities rely heavily on key volunteers who coordinate, moderate, and lead. Participants described the founder as a matriarch or chief, but the authors note that this leadership role demands a significant and consistent investment of time and energy that could become challenging to sustain. Similar precarity affects other contributors: the participant who created sketchnotes for nearly every chat during the first two seasons eventually found the workload unsustainable. The authors observe that learning ecosystems relying on social media and voluntary participation achieve a stability that is always in tension with the precarity of social media platforms and the absence of institutional sponsorship. Notably, when X/Twitter underwent significant changes, the ecosystem did not collapse, as additional platforms came more to the fore, illustrating a resilience born of multiplatform diversification.

The implications reach beyond this single case. For educators, the authors suggest that diversifying platform use and seeking out resilient learning ecosystems may be wise given threatened and real bans, ownership changes, and shifting platform practices. For administrators and policymakers, the message is more cautionary: because participation in such ecosystems is self-directed and informal, attempts to formalize, require, or scale up participation risk destroying the autonomy, voice, and choice that draw teachers to these spaces in the first place. The authors call for future research using interviews to probe how teachers experience different ecosystem components, studies of additional multiplatform instances, and work teasing out the impacts of such experiences on teaching beliefs, practices, and student outcomes. As online professional activities become routine elements of teachers’ working lives, the #CharlasEducativas offer a glimpse of what educator professional learning may look like in a future characterized by multiplatform social media activity: organic, community-driven, and spanning every space where teachers gather.

Subject of Research: Multiplatform social media ecosystems for self-directed teacher professional learning

Article Title: Multiplatform ecosystems of professional learning: The case of the #CharlasEducativas

Article References: Carpenter, J. P., Mosquera-Gende, I., & Marcelo-Martínez, P. (2025). Multiplatform ecosystems of professional learning: The case of the #CharlasEducativas. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 14(1), Article 6. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-024-00024-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-024-00024-7

Keywords: professional learning, social media, learning ecosystem, teacher professional development, multiplatform, YouTube, X/Twitter, online communities, informal learning, Spain, educators, hashtags