Microlearning from the KM perspective
6. The current generation of youth is much more plugged into mobile and social media, and prefer self-management of their knowledge activities. They favor peer-networking activities over top-down instructional flows, and thus can become more effective in teaching and learning from one another. Microlearning is one way for them to structure and validate their shared learnings.
7. Digital media are becoming not just pervasive but also persuasive technologies. Tools like tablets can become platforms for persuasive learning and communication, thanks to features for self-monitoring, observation, guidance and reinforcement. That is especially applicable to motivated learners, says Peter Baumgartner, professor of interactive media and education at Danube University.
8. Internal and external crowdsourcing can be used to augment corporate learning. For example, the design and content of micro-courses can be collaboratively built up within a company or university, as shown by Manuela Vogler, head of the Mobile KnowledgeLab at Research Studio MINE in Austria.
9. In the KM context, microlearning can become an additional channel of formal knowledge capture in communities of practice (CoPs), a tool for personal KM, and a platform for social learning and peer study groups. In innovation management, microlearning can help build the discipline of creative observation and understanding the different types of innovation (e.g., product, service, platform, channel, brand, ecosystem).
10. Microlearning can also be used to teach startup skills to aspiring entrepreneurs, according to Tina Gruber-Mücke from Johanns Kepler University in Austria. The language of venture capital, techniques of adaptive pivoting and the types of innovation can be taught via a series of micro-courses to young entrepreneurs in college, mid-career professionals and innovation teams.
Outside the corporate workspace, microlearning has been used to teach how to play the dombyra string instrument in Kazakhstan, in physics courses in Guyana and to a booming base of learners in China's mobile market.
In the coming years, microlearning will also be seen as playing an important role in knowledge retention and opening up new frontiers of knowledge co-creation in the mobile era.