AI-generated summary
Microlearning is an emerging educational approach that delivers content in small, digestible modules designed to enhance understanding and retention. This method leverages diverse formats such as short videos, infographics, text, audio, gamification, and student-led projects, all characterized by their brevity and engaging structure. Originating from predecessors like MOOCs and TED talks, microlearning has flourished in the digital age, supported by platforms like Coursera and edX. Its design caters to the modern attention economy, where individuals face constant information overload and divided focus, making brief, well-structured learning units particularly effective.
The benefits of microlearning are manifold. It improves content assimilation by presenting information in concise segments, boosting concentration and interest. Its digital nature promotes educational accessibility, allowing learners to study anytime and anywhere via smartphones or computers. Furthermore, microlearning is highly adaptable to individual learning needs and schedules, making it ideal for both students and professionals. In the workplace, where frequent interruptions and rapid changes demand continual skill development, microlearning facilitates timely upskilling and reskilling. As job markets evolve, ongoing education becomes essential, and microlearning provides a practical solution for lifelong learning amid busy lives. This approach complements traditional methods, offering flexible, efficient training suited to today’s fast-paced environments.
Fragmenting didactic content and encapsulating it in small formats is the ultimate training weapon in the face of information overload.
A master’s degree with complete subjects that last a couple of sessions. An app that allows you to learn languages in your free time. Of course, also tutorials on Youtube, infographics, threads of tweets or mini-games in schools. Welcome to the era of microlearning, the pill education that is triumphing among students and workers around the world.
It is no coincidence that this trend has skyrocketed in recent years. In fact, microlearning has found the perfect terrain to flourish in an environment of attention economy, in which all kinds of stimuli try to seduce ours.
What is microlearning
Microlearning is a relatively recent way of approaching competency-based education. This approach administers the different teachings encapsulated in small modules. The objective: to promote the understanding of the different course materials, as well as the retention of information.
Basically , microlearning fragments didactic content and encapsulates it in small formats that also seek to be attractive to the student. This is the main reason why audiovisual microlearning formats are successful, allowing visual and sound stimuli to be added easily.
With this in mind, it is easy to trace the family tree of microlearning: from its grandparents the MOOCs – massive open courses – launched by Stanford University in 2011 to progenitors such as TED talks or webinars. Today, there are entire platforms where universities around the world use short videos to deliver their courses. This is the case of Coursera or edX, founded by MIT and Harvard University, and which offers more than 3,500 courses in 30 topics.
However , microlearning goes far beyond videos and uses multiple formats, including text, audio, infographics, gamifications of all kinds and even projects prepared by the students themselves to explain concepts to their classmates.
All of them have in common their brevity. However, that is not enough. In addition
Benefits of microlearning
Efficiency is one of the strongest points of microlearning. This type of format favors the assimilation of content, which is presented in small pills, in a short time. Specifically, this learning sequenced in micro-content improves students’ concentration and its dynamics also help to increase their interest.
In addition, microlearning contributes to universalizing education, since the vast majority of the formats it uses are digital. This means that they can be easily consumed anytime, anywhere just by having access to a smartphone or computer and the internet.
In fact, the adaptability of microlearning to the particularities of the student is very high, both for reasons of time and space and for their own educational needs. After all, it is much easier to customize small modules or short content both to the characteristics of the students and to possible changes in the subjects.
Microlearning in an Attention Economy
All these characteristics make microlearning a format that is particularly suitable for a context of attention economy such as the current one. At a time when the constant bombardment of information leads us to divide our attention between various topics and for short periods of time, our margin to maintain it begins to narrow.
This phenomenon has an explanation and it does not necessarily have to do with something strange happening in our brains. In reality, what is happening is that we now have the same time as before to fix our attention, while the options towards which we can direct it have multiplied. Their growth has been so strong
In this context of competition, they must learn to deal with both the education of the younger generations and the training in adulthood. One of the weapons they have at their disposal is microlearning, with content designed to capture the interest of students and help them assimilate the content. In short, we are talking about formats adapted to the rhythm of the attention economy.
All this does not mean that a classroom should become a hyper-stimulated space led by a kind of TikTok influencer. In fact, microlearning is one more tool that can be used in education, along with other longer formats.
It’s not even essential to employ short videos and games with dopamine-packed rewards in the classroom. Sometimes, using short texts or easily assimilated infographics is
Training for new work environments
Attention jumps are not exclusive to teenagers with a phone in their hand. Today’s work environment—which awaits them in the future, too—is characterized by constant interruptions and jumps in attention from one task to another, leading to higher levels of stress, frustration, and effort to get tasks done.
Formats such as microlearning are particularly well adapted to these circumstances as they allow, on the one hand, the professional to acquire knowledge when it suits them best, in a context of lack of time. On the other hand, they facilitate upskilling and reskilling that will help you navigate this hectic environment.
To talk about these issues, the Bankinter Innovation Foundation has recently brought together world-class experts in its Future Trends Forum on the future of work. And there’s bad news for procrastinators: it doesn’t seem like things like reskilling or upskilling can wait much longer. Not at least not in a context in which millions of jobs are disappearing and being created, as the expert Alper Utku illustrated during his speech.
Precisely in an environment such as work, in which changes are happening at an ever-increasing speed, this incorporation of skills must be permanent. As Jeff Selingo explained during his presentation, employers will look for the specific skills they need in the talent they are going to hire, rather than a specific degree.
In these circumstances, it is clear that both recent graduates and working professionals will need to strive to acquire the right skills at every point in their careers . That is, they will have to pursue these skills throughout their lives.
Those times when you studied a degree and pawned your books on the mountain of piety when you finished it are definitely gone. In the new ones, when we will need to incorporate constant training in a saturated day-to-day life, microlearning will be especially useful thanks to its adaptability.
