Learning can be time consuming, especially for continuing education/post graduate students. Maintaining a balance between work and study time can be difficult (especially if we have other responsibilities), finding time to learn is definitely a challenge.
Microlearning is considered to be the more engaging, less time-consuming, and cheaper-to-produce sibling of regular eLearning. While it’s not the best solution for every learning/training need, it’s a surprisingly effective one for corporate and commercial training.
With Arist (https://www.arist.co), this mobile app changes the way we view and define Microlearning. Traditionally, learners need to seek out learning on their own but with Arist, it brings learning directly to the learner by making the experience engaging, accessible, and impactful by meeting people where they already spend 80% of their time (their smartphones), all in just 5 minutes a day.
How it works
A typical Arist lesson takes no more than 5 minutes, but is equal to 20-30 minutes worth of traditional e-learning. String together lessons to make full trainings.
- Content Creation: Participants can join, create and launch lessons in minutes as users can easily build in media files, explanations, and interactive assessments or exercises with instant feedback. Instantly launch to all communication tools in 100+ languages.
- Delivering Content: Learning can take place anywhere. Rapidly build custom cohorts and assign courses, or let learners opt-in on any device via QR code, phrase, or a link. Setting up spaced learning, chatbot-style experiences, or scheduled message blasts is as easy as clicking a button. Reminders are fully built-in and everything is automated.
Usefulness in Schools
While the concept sounds attractive (especially for corporations), does anyone think this kind of approach will be suitable for K-12/University students? Microlearning is still a highly divisive topic as there is debate about the lack of depth/content in these smaller lessons compared to traditional hour long courses. Perhaps they could be used for test revisions or basic skill & drill exercises to help students remember important concepts, formulas and theories?
Hi John, thanks for sharing about Arist. I feel like Arist is an excellent example of mobile learning and open learning. It is highly accessible, mobile, and fluid. I discovered four courses that are currently available on Arist, which are Supply Chain and Logistics, Fundamentals of AI in Business, DEI Program Best Practices, and Career Development: Goal-setting. These are very intriguing topics indeed. I hope that in the near future, Arist is going to offer more courses that can meet the various needs of learners.
Hi Vera, I like how you mentioned fluid as a keyword, most learning today is quite rigid and overly follows a structure which doesn’t encourage students to discover their own interests (mobile culture should also be fluid and quickly accessible). Wow you’re even faster than me in exploring Arist, good to know you found some relatable courses (AI in Business sounds interesting). I wonder if it’ll be easy for schools to implement their own version of text based learning
I have never seen this before, John. My favourite features are the text enhancements and learner analytics that Arist offers. It is appealing in the idea of being able to send texts to your learners for microlearning, but also for the course creator in how simple it is to facilitate. I plan to explore this platform and observe if there are pre-made templates, and other user-friendly features available for the course creator.
Hi Agnes, that’s a fantastic point as learning analytics are often overlooked when people discuss about ed tech. It’s great to see how Arist includes it for course designers/admins. In most cases only larger LMS systems have access to in depth data analytics, definitely encouraging to see mobile culture catching up and offering a suite of tools which rivals them. It would be neat if learning becomes as natural as sending text messages, it would definitely make learning more intuitive and easily integrated into our schedules
This is a great topic to discuss! Microlearning is really beneficial for everyone, especially for teachers. There are many resources out there on how to develop our professions as teachers, all these resources are presented through hours-long presentations and videos, which can be overwhelming and complicated. Learning how to teach is complex and developing, most teachers are already busy and don’t really have time to learn new skills. Microlearning might be the answer to gaining bits of information for teachers with busy schedules.
Hi Maria, imagine how much time teachers can save if lessons were condensed into micro formats. More time could be invested into course design, student consultation or improving the classroom experience. I like the idea of continuing training/professional development through Microlearning as teachers can still participate in the latest developments while quickly intaking new knowledge through bite sized portions. In a sense it makes learning easier while reducing the amount of stress caused by multitasking
Very interesting, John. I am glad you shared this because I remember last year a peer in another MET course who had taken 523 mentioned text-based micro-learning and I was intrigued by it. I think this is something worth trying out to see how effective it is. My feeling is that, as we often see with technology-based learning methodologies, context is important and I can imagine being very beneficial for some specific groups of learners and specific subjects. As you mention, depth could be a concern but perhaps this also depends on the specific subject being covered and the level of skill the course seeks to develop. This reminds me of the recent trend of book summary websites – another intriguing solution I’m interested in trying out.
Hi Eduardo, your point reminded me of a line of revision books called Nutshells where important fundamentals of a topic are filtered down to bullet points. They’re very handy for revision, wonder if Microlearning could take a similar approach to make learning easier. Agree that’s worth trying out though it might be hard to convince someone to take the initial plunge. Context is definitely important though having too much also backfires as it’s hard to remember too much information at a given time, perhaps Microlearning could be the key to solving information overload