Why Microlearning?

Many individuals are working hard to incorporate Microlearning into their various educational systems whether it be for corporate training or for formal education. But what is Microlearning, really?

What is Microlearning?

Microlearning is a method of teaching which involves presenting content to learners in small bite-sized units. Sometimes students find tackling a large chunk of information to be quite difficult, so it can help to keep them motivated by presenting it into very small pieces with rewards to mark progress. For busy adult learners, it also aids in fitting in learning when they don’t have time to learn.

Microlearning vs. Traditional Teaching

Attention is the fulcrum for learner success.  According to a Microsoft study in 2015, humans, on average, can only be interested voluntarily in a thing for just 8 seconds. Therefore, as an educator, if you cannot capture the attention of your students within 8-9 seconds, you’ll have a hard time retaining their attention for the rest of the class. In fact, in the case of traditional teaching at higher institutions where hourly lectures are the norm, the rigidity of the discourse will most times have minds wandering, and learner engagement is quickly lost.

This is a major issue with MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses) where the approach has been simply to put the lecture online. Though MOOCs have been fantastic at increasing access to education, the format doesn’t allow for the interaction of the individual with the professor or other students, within the lecture which makes it measurably worse than a classroom experience, which is often ineffective at best anyway.

Microlearning offers learners the chance to stay engaged. If their attention does become divided, they can pause their learning, revisiting the course when they are at full capacity to learn. The Pensar methodology engages the learner frequently with a variety of easy-to-create interactions that both aid in the retention of the information but also simply to hold their attention.

By operating on short precise content, it allows the learner the ability to assimilate key points in the text, and by assessing frequently the understanding and re-presenting key materials in a mastery format, Microlearning approaches ensure better retention of information.

Construction of Microlearning

Microlearning breaks down content into modules which are not only concise and precise but are easily accessible for later review at any time. Most Microlearning is mobile-compatible so that learners can easily pull out their cell phones to go over a training course or review past materials at a time that they can integrate the learning best.

It offers a range of benefits such as:

1. Tailor-made Customisations: Microlearning enables personalized learning. Students can learn and master areas of expertise that suits them.

2. Worldwide Availability: Microlearning can be made available to anyone in the world, with a mobile device.

3. Cost effective: In comparison to tuition paid in educational institutes, the cost of setting up Microlearning (along with updating modules) is relatively cheap and affordable.

4. Adds Value: Microlearning cuts out unneeded information and allows learners to focus on relevant content that is applicable to their area of expertise

5. Motivation: The ease of Microlearning’s process gives learners the motivation to acquire more knowledge as it breaks down texts into modules.

In a world that is becoming increasingly digitalized, Microlearning stands to be the pioneer of the digital educational revolution. The internet is broadening the scope of education from the rigidity of the classroom to the flexibility of mobile devices. Microlearning suits the modern world and is gunning strong for the future.

Leave a Reply


