Microlearning

Abstract

Microlearning is a mode of learning in which material is segmented into small units consisting of texts, video, audio, or activities. Though classroom instruction can be designed with microlearning in mind, it is especially associated with online education, self-guided education, and increasingly with mobile apps. Microlearning can be used to impart traditional academic knowledge, but is also used for skills training, whether in the workplace or as part of the user’s professional development.

Overview

Microlearning is an approach to education and skills training in which the learning material is divided into and learned in small units, usually in mediated environments (such as on computers, tablets, or mobile devices, or various smart devices). Material needs to be specially prepared for microlearning; it is not simply taking a textbook or other course materials and parceling it out a little at a time. Traditional teaching approaches have always divided material into units of teaching time: American history might first be divided into “from pre-Columbian civilizations to the Civil War” and “from the Civil War to 9/11,” with each subdivision encompassing a semester’s instruction, and further divided according to the schedule of tests and exams within the semester, and then into the course material that will be covered in any given week or class session. Microlearning simply takes this a step further, continuing those divisions into smaller and smaller well-defined chunks of course material. Such units are planned in sequence such that they relate to or build on one another.

In modern instructional design theory, design is discussed in terms of the micro, meso, and macro levels. The macro level consists of the entirety of a school or other program. The meso level is the structure of a specific course. The micro level refers to the structure of a specific lesson. Though this holds true in microlearning, the size of a microlearning lesson is significantly smaller than that of a traditional 30- to 90-minute classroom lesson. While microlearning can be used in designing or organizing course materials for traditional classroom environments (whether K-12 or college level), it is more commonly used in online education and e-learning. While online education itself encompasses many levels of education, both it and microlearning are particularly associated with andragogy—the teaching of adults, which over the course of the twentieth century increasingly came to be understood as a separate teaching discipline from the teaching of children (even older teenagers). Microlearning techniques have, essentially, always been in use, but explicit discussion of microlearning as a pedagogical mode began in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries with the rise of online education. By the 2010s, microlearning had become the foundation of most online and hybrid (combining online and face-to-face) courses. Microlearning software was sold for job training, and microlearning-based educational apps like the foreign language learning software Duolingo had become popular.

The segmentation of material into microlearning units can include reading material, problems to solve, activities, lectures (sometimes called “micro lectures,” especially if they were prepared specifically for microlearning), and other things. Usually, microlearning focuses less on discussion and group activities than classroom techniques do, largely because of the needs of online education. Even when microlearning techniques are used in a traditional classroom setting, they are often found incorporated as individual or self-guided activities rather than group activities. Online courses may include chat room or forum discussions, which may be optional and offer an opportunity for students to ask questions and engage with the material. This is especially found in massive open online courses (MOOCs), for instance, which are online courses with large numbers of participants.

There are challenges to designing microlearning materials. A sequence of small chunks of learning activities related to the same subject does not necessarily add up to a whole. Mathematics material, for example, may be subdivided to create discrete units out of complex material in such a way that the student completing the course may not apprehend the material as well as a student in a traditional classroom. This is not to say that mathematics is less suited as a subject to microlearning—the tradition of learning mathematics by doing math problems, for instance, lends itself very well to microlearning, whereas history courses divided in the manner of mathematics courses face the danger of being transformed into a set of dates and trivia rather than a real understanding of historical events.

The standards of microlearning are still in flux, much as the standards of pedagogy in K-12 public education took time to develop. The content used in microlearning is sometimes called microcontent, meaning small amounts of relevant information that can be absorbed in a small amount of time. The term “microcontent” is used in a broader sense in other contexts, though, to refer to the kinds of information that users take in while skimming or glancing at a screen: headlines, push notifications, texts and instant messages, content previews on search results pages, and various forms of titles (e-mail subject headers, for instance, or subheaders in online articles).

Microlearning sessions usually last less than five minutes (sometimes five to ten when video or audio components are included). In many cases, users may access several sessions in a row, but the ability to come to a stop eases the experience. An increasingly common strategy in designing microlearning courses, especially in app and website design and even skills training in the workplace, is gamification.

Gamification takes game elements and principles and transfers them to a non-game environment in order to increase engagement and help drive desired results. Gamification has become common in many contexts, not just education; health and fitness apps that use gamification have been exceptionally popular, for instance, and even the older ideas of counting calories or Weight Watchers points are ideas that depend on game principles. While gamification has been a popular 2010s buzzword, the basic concept is a simple one that has been familiar for generations. Parents, for instance, have long “gamified” certain household activities as a way to engage and appease children—activities that range from a chore wheel to determine chore assignments to tying allowance increments to specific household chores (a reward system to drive user activity) to pretending a spoon laden with baby food is an airplane to make the baby feel like feeding time is fun.

In fact, gamification is sometimes criticized for its resemblance to these parenting techniques: When not designed well, a gamified activity can seem patronizing to its users and risks making them feel that their participation is being trivialized. There is considerable disagreement over the efficacy and appropriateness of gamification, in no small part because the researchers familiar with business research or education are not always familiar with game design and its associated theory, and vice versa. This is an issue that impacts the design of gamified activities, too; while the simple elements of a chore wheel or allowance rewards are fine for parents to use with young children, robust game mechanics need a deeper understanding of behavioral theory and game design theory.

Gamification is usually not the term used for actual games that are also educational. More typically, it refers to game elements in non-game contexts, especially when those elements encourage greater participation or engagement, or reward users for specific activity. For instance, loyalty rewards cards used by many businesses are a very simple form of gamification. Modern businesses have taken this concept and elaborated on it in apps that encourage users to check-in, use the app to order, buy certain promoted items, and so forth. Microlearning apps can be gamified in much the same way. There need be no tangible reward, but rewards that impact app usage are common—for example, an activity in a microlearning app that requires that the user answer ten flashcard questions correctly; answering all ten in a row on the first try may reward the user with a star. Ten stars can be traded in for a clock, which can be activated to “rewind,” allowing the user a second chance to answer a question correctly without penalizing his progress. Alternately, ten stars could be spent on an owl that offers a hint to a question. The rewards and incentives are ephemeral, but they vary the experience, and can help keep the user engaged. Similarly, in the school system, there are numerous forms of ranking—class rank, dean’s list, honor roll—which carry no tangible reward but place students in competition with one another in their performance of otherwise noncompetitive activities, much like the high score screen in a video game does.

Gamification is a common technique in online and software-based tutorials, essentially creating a microlearning experience that guides the user through the skills necessary to master a specific task. Unlike a simple list of instructions, a gamified tutorial offers a way to affirm that the user understands the information that has been provided. For instance, some major banks offer gamified tutorials for some of their mobile and online banking features, which assists bank customers who may not be computer-savvy. Beginning in 2011, Microsoft included a game as part of Office Suite to teach users how to use its features. Gamified skill training is also used for first responders and military training, where there are antecedents in the form of “war games” and other exercises. Studies have shown gains in productivity and engagement when gamified skills training and onboarding is used in the workplace, and workers report greater enjoyment.

Applications

Microlearning applications sometimes use push technology to deliver the educational content to the user. Push technology is a mode of Internet communications in which content originating with the publisher is sent to the user without needing to be requested at that time; the push notification of a newspaper’s mobile phone app, for instance, as opposed to the story to which that push notification links, which the user only sees when he initiates the transaction by clicking on it. Push technology is widely used in mobile apps in the form of notifications, but can also be used to deliver learning content at specific or random intervals, thereby introducing a microlearning experience into the user’s day with less cognitive load than if the user took the time to open an app or seek out a website.

One of the big successes in microlearning apps has been Duolingo, a foreign language microlearning app. Duolingo developed out of a project begun in 2009 by Carnegie Mellon University’s Luis von Ahn, who two years earlier had introduced reCAPTCHA, a system that used CAPTCHAs to contribute to digital transcription (and later image labeling). Like microlearning, reCAPTCHA relies on very small but meaningful tasks—for example, the selection of images that contain cars or signs from a gallery. Those tasks served two purposes: First, by performing a task that a human would find easy but a bot would find difficult or impossible, the user’s identity as a human was proved; second, tasks performed by humans contributed to the digitization of text libraries and in the development of artificial intelligence by labeling images in order to help teach software to identify cars and other street features. Duolingo was originally intended to be a similar “twofer” system: Users would be taught a foreign language through, among other activities, translating phrases in documents, essentially performing real-life translation work in the form of very small tasks.

Duolingo has since developed differently, and is supported by a number of venture capital investments while operating as a “freemium” service in which users may use the app for free or pay a subscription fee to remove in-app advertisements. It is available both as an app and as a website, and offers more than thirty foreign language courses for English speakers, including less common offerings like Navajo, Hawaiian, and the fictional languages of High Valyrian and Klingon. There are also a number of courses for non-English speakers, including Catalan and Guarani courses for Spanish speakers. Learning is gamified using experience points, in-game currency, and leaderboards, and rewards “streaks” (using the app every day), while downgrading users’ levels when they go too long without logging in. Duolingo was the first educational app to be awarded Apple’s App of the Year honor, in 2013, and was one of the most downloaded educational apps across several platforms in 2013 and 2014. Duolingo for Schools is a paid service that allows teachers to incorporate Duolingo into their lesson plans, augmenting rather than replacing classroom teaching.

Foreign language learning is ideally suited to microlearning, and many traditional foreign language teaching techniques adapt well to the mode. There are promising possibilities in mobile microlearning even beyond Duolingo. A 2007 study, for instance, used ubiquitous sensing with a mobile phone application: Every household object, including furniture, appliances, dishware, and so on, in a home was equipped with a sensor such that when the holder of the mobile phone interacted with the object (opening the dishwasher, sitting on a couch), the sensor triggered an audio “flash card” that gave both the English and Spanish word for the object. While the home needed to be specially prepared for the study, in a future in which smart and Bluetooth-enabled objects are increasingly common, such an app could slot right into an existing smart home infrastructure.

Issues

Because of the way microlearning segments and sequences learning material, it is also an adept approach to teaching slower learners. Online courses are often structured so as to be self-guided, which often also means self-paced. The clear progression from one task to the next ensures that a slower learner is not “left behind” as he might be in a classroom environment where the mean sets the pace.

Driven by attention-related concerns resulting from the online and mobile user environments with which it is most associated, microlearning is related to a variety of phenomena that are principally found online. Flash fiction, for instance, consists of stories that are less than 1,000 words, and has been written by authors like Italo Calvino and Ernest Hemingway. The rise of platforms like Twitter has led to extremely short stories that fit the platform’s 280-character limit. However, while microlearning relies on small segments of learning material that add up to a whole that is intended to be no different than the whole assembled by traditional classroom learning, flash fiction has developed its own set of tropes and norms that differentiate it in scope and intent from traditional fiction: like the famous “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” attributed (probably incorrectly) to Hemingway, flash fiction hints at a larger story untold.

The major antecedent to microlearning is the flashcard. Flashcards became a popular learning tool in the nineteenth century, when the rise of free and compulsory public education led to a flurry of activity in developing pedagogical techniques, and they emphasize memorization and active recall, while forcing the preparer to express material from the course in simple, microlearning-like chunks. The classic flashcard consists of a question or problem on one side and the answer on the other, allowing them to be used in self-guided learning, or with the assistance of a helper who need not be familiar with the material himself. They were a popular way to teach phonics in the nineteenth century, and throughout the twentieth century were often used in early education to teach basic math concepts. They continue to be a popular study tool, usually tailored to the material a student expects to be on an upcoming exam. Flashcard software was among the earliest educational software, and digital flashcards are often a component of microlearning apps and online courses.

Terms & Concepts

Andragogy: The teaching of adults. While “pedagogy” means the teaching of children, pedagogy and its derivatives are often still used to refer to the teaching discipline as a whole in contexts where the character of the students is either unknown or irrelevant to the discussion.

E-learning: Education online or using mobile technology (sometimes called m-learning), whether in the sense of formal education (accredited, degree- or diploma-earning, job training, exam prep, tutoring) or informal education (including educational games, non-degree–earning continuing education, and other forms).

Gamification: The transposition of game elements and game design principles to a non-game environment, especially for the purpose of achieving a certain result, whether that means encouraging certain activities (visiting a business, eating healthily) or, as in the case of microlearning, imparting specific information and skills.

K-12: Kindergarten through twelfth grade; the combination of primary and secondary education, the grades in which education in the United States is both available for free and compulsory.

MOOC: Massive open online course; can include both accredited courses taken for degree credit (or professional certification or other tangible goals) and courses taken for personal enrichment or other needs. MOOCs are conducted online and have either a very high upper bound on number of participants, or no limit at all. Many of them are self-guided, meaning that a student can begin the course at any time, progressing through self-guided activities, readings, and lectures.

Segmentation: Segmentation is the division of material into discrete segments without reducing their relevance or coherence; as a simple example, “The Alphabet Song” breaks the alphabet into segments like A-B-C-D, E-F-G, H-I-J-K … in order to fit an easy to remember meter, without breaking the sequence or losing any elements.

Bibliography

Bouwmeester, R. A. M., de Kleijn, R. A. M., Freriksen, A. W. M., van Emst, M. G., Veeneklaas, R. J., van Hoeij, M. J. W., … van Rijen, H. V. M. . (2013). Online formative tests linked to microlectures improving academic achievement. Medical Teacher, 35(12), 1044–1046. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=92016339&site=ehost-live

Brebera, P. (2017). Microlearning in foreign language courses: A threat or a promise? Proceedings of the European Conference on Games Based Learning, 85–93. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=126280658&site=ehost-live

Giurgiu, L. (2017). Microlearning an evolving elearning trend. Buletin Stiintific, 22(1), 18–23.

Iskander, N., Lowe, N., & Riordan, C. (2010). The rise and fall of a micro-learning region: Mexican immigrants and construction in center-south Philadelphia. Environment & Planning A, 42(7), 1595–1612.

Janjua, N. (2017). Piloting surgical near-peer microlearning sessions: Lessons learnt from students and teachers. Education in Medicine Journal, 9(2), 65–68.

Major, A., & Calandrino, T. (2018). Beyond chunking. Distance Learning, 15(2), 27–30. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=132436654&site=ehost-live

Osaigbovo, I. I., & Iwegim, C. F. (2018). Instagram: A niche for microlearning of undergraduate medical microbiology. African Journal of Health Professions Education, 10(2), 75.

Sweet, D. (2014). Microlectures in a flipped classroom: Application, creation and resources. Mid-Western Educational Researcher, 26(1), 52–59. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=98710275&site=ehost-live

Suggested Reading

Dillon, J. D. (2018). A microlearning experience about microlearning. Training, 55(3), 42. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=129557280&site=ehost-live

Eldridge, B. (2017). Developing a microlearning strategy with or without an LMS. ELearning & Software for Education, 1, 48–51. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=123025148&site=ehost-live

Microlearning FAQS: Learn how to get smarter faster. (2018). Professional Safety, 63(7), 24. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=130475661&site=ehost-live