Education loves buzzwords, and there's always someone keen to come along and re-frame established learning approaches under a new banner ... to present it as something new when really ... it's just established practice. Certainly if you've worked in the education sector for any length of time, the number of initiatives that are simply what's old painted as something new can cause fad fatigue. I don't know how many times I've heard long career teachers sigh in frustration and exclaim 'oh, that's just like the X program that we were served up years ago'.
Microlearning feels like one of these misdirects, with very specific and often isolated learning opportunities in a digital environment now increasingly tarred with this brush.
Still, in the case of microlearning, I think it may benefit from further scrutiny. On the face of it, it is simply scaffolding or independent learning opportunities in a new form. Look a little more closely however, and you start to see some differences ... and some opportunities, particularly where the platform and framework it's delivered over are concerned.
The most common platform for consideration is mobile, with good reason. Convenience and mobility are certainly advantages here, with micro learning opportunities presented in an often more adaptable and personal package with choice and point of need the key ingredients. There are also the geographic and time sensitive advantages offered with a mobile platform that serves up learning on demand. Think Dualingo, and the their gameification of language learning and the countless YouTube videos that are desperate to help you where very specific training needs arise.
Those discrete learning opportunities are increasingly offered at precisely the right time and place, depending on how well your learning ecosystems knows you habits of course. Your next micro learning opportunity might be your next 5 minute language training session, popping up to coincide with small gaps in your daily schedule.
Or, you might be starting your new car for the first time, and discover a small learning object has become available to teach you how to more effectively employ a new feature. Training that neatly dovetails affordances presented through design will increasingly set microlearning apart, and mobile is a natural platform.
The other opportunity micro learning promises, is the more integrated scaffolding that a learning ecosystem can offer, where a broad range of competencies might support significant goals. Increasingly LMS systems allow for greater complexity in dependencies, branching algorithms where one area of comprehension or skill acquirement releases and supports the next challenge. Yes, it's scaffolding, but the benefit of micro learning objects, is that they might increasingly be broadly dependant on a wider framework, more closely linked to larger goals.
Useful independently, they become very powerful when seen as a whole. The benefit of this is flexibility, more easily affording multiple paths to success. You may be climbing the same mountain as I am, but we can take different paths, and both still achieve a good outcome.
Micro learning is often touted as a solution to the next generation of learners hindered by short attention spans. In reality, it promises a more integrated and tailored approach to learning, where we can more accurately target a sequence of skills and knowledge needed to achieve very individual learning goals.