This week’s term, microlearning, was inspired by several Twitter chats I’ve been lurking for awhile now. In times like these where information is constantly requested/searched, there’s a greater trend toward instant gratification – and the wonders of the Internet can do magic to make this happen!
Microlearning
Microlearning refers to learning that occurs in bite sized chunks or very short-term learning activities. For example, these Twitter chats. Each week, participants respond to questions posed and are able to read (and respond to) the responses of fellow participants. It’s really a great form of collaborative learning. Twitter chats are a great example, because responses occur within the constraint of 140 characters, and learners are encouraged to synthesize this information in bite-sized responses or presentation.
But who the heck would this benefit?!
Everyone involved! Well – maybe not everyone (there are always outliers), but most participants and facilitators. I’ll give you an example of how microlearning is working in an online course I worked on.
The faculty member came to me wanting to redevelop her course. She wanted to swap out some readings and make it more engaging for students. Her course consists of about 3000 pages of readings over a semester (they’re all children’s books), a midterm and final exam, and some written assignments. Holy crap! What a slave driver, you might think…the reality is not really, but I could see how students might balk at the workload. In any event, she was struggling with quality forum participation because the students were exhausted by the workload and couldn’t commit to writing lengthy posts and responses. She also tried a wiki to no avail (well – it worked, but not in an optimal manner). I suggested a Twitter chat for her; like the forum posts, she could incite participation out of a course requirement and she could require the student post one original response to the question and respond to at least two of their peers, BUT the student would only be required to write a maximum of 420 characters instead of potentially a minimum of 1500 words!
This approach benefits the faculty member in terms of her participation grading and it benefits the students by requiring less of their already taxing workload to obtain the elusive participation points (some students would just drop the participation grade of 5-10% as they were too swamped to participate, but 5-10% can mean a lot of the course of a course).
Confused by what I’m talking about? Here are some great examples and some resources!
- Lrnchat
- EdTechChat
- Microlearning.org
- Application of Microlearning Technique and Twitter for Educational Purposes by B.H. Aitchanov, A.B. Satabaldiyev, and K.N. Latuta
- Mobile Learning with Micro Content: A Framework and Evaluation by Peter A. Bruck
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