Post Three: Microlearning, journalism have much in common

The Provincial Instructor Diploma Program offered through Vancouver Community College includes a number of online-only courses, including Foundations of Adult Education.

MARCH 16, 2020: As I was reading and thinking about microlearning, I kept comparing it to what I had learned as a journalist. People have limited attention spans and those attention spans are getting shorter. Readers and viewers today are not likely to read anything, or sit through anything, that bores them. They’re not likely to read more than two or three paragraphs of any article and they’re not likely to watch a TV news story that’s any longer than 90 seconds.

I see the same behaviour in my classroom. I can have a room full of engaged students, watching a video, but when that video hits the four-minute mark, one by one the number of engaged students starts to drop off.

I hadn’t realized, until doing some research, how much of what I knew about reader/viewer behaviour would apply to teaching. Call it my aha moment.

Then I started thinking about how I could incorporate microlearning into my lesson plans. It seemed daunting. Prior to starting my job, I hadn’t been in a classroom in almost 20 years. We were still relying on teachers, and books in the library, for information. I had never seen microlearning in action. Could it work? Could I do it? Would I learn that way?

And then I realized … I had seen it in action, I could do it, and I could learn that way.

When I first started reading about microlearning, Ted-Ed videos were the example cited most often. These videos of less than five minutes introduce students to the course material one topic at a time.

Where had I seen those before? On the Moodle page for this course, Foundations of Adult Education. When I signed up for this course, the first thing I did was go to the website. There, I was able to watch a series of videos — all fewer than five minutes in length — which explained various elements of the course. I’m a reader. I don’t typically enjoy getting information through videos. However, these were short videos, clearly labelled, and they each addressed a single topic. I watched them all. I even went back and watched some of them a second time, when I needed the information again.

Microlearning.

I did it before I even knew it was a thing. More importantly, I enjoyed it and I can see why my students would, too.