There’s been a lot of talk about microlearning of late – definitions, calls for clarity, value propositions, etc – and I have to say that I’m afraid some of it (not what I’ve linked to) is a wee bit facile. Or, at least, conceptually unclear. And I think that’s a problem. This came up again in a recent conversation, and I had a further thought (which of course I have to blog about ;). It’s about how to do microdesign, that is, how to design micro learning. And it’s not trivial.
So one of the common views of micro learning is that it’s just in time. That is, if you need to know how to do something, you look it up. And that’s just fine (as I’ve recently ranted). But it’s not learning. (In short: it’ll help you in the moment, but unless you design it to support learning, it’s performance support instead). You can call it Just In Time support, or microsupport, but properly, it’s not micro learning.