Abstract:

Consumers, increasingly empowered and connected through social networks, use microlearning in a natural and habitual way to solve all kinds of doubts and needs in their day-to-day life in a “micro” and “instant” way, showing preference for consuming educational content in short videos, via mobile, pulling the knowledge and information they need when they need it.

This behavior has been observed by new players in the field of education quickly entering the market to take advantage of such opportunity. This means that in the space traditionally occupied by higher education institutions, a variety of new entrants have been emerging such as EdTechs, digital giants such as Google, with Google Career Certificates, and even social networks such as TikTok, with #LearnOnTikTok, the latter achieving over 360 billion views.

Established higher education institutions have also experimented with microlearning, showing positive results in different disciplines, such us to teach soft skills or reasoning skills development, among others.

The first academic research on microlearning appeared almost twenty years ago, but to date, the number of academic contributions is still limited, in spite of the significant growth of publications in the last two years.

Most research has focused on exploring the different topics of microlearning at the level of the “microlearning object” itself, that is, at the level of the individual lesson or mini-lesson (e.g., a 5’ video)”, namely at the micro level, and also at the module / course level (e.g., a combination of 10 videos of 5’), which is considered a meso level.

As new EdTech players have introduced successfully new microlearning value propositions that accumulate hundreds of microlearning units forming a macrolearning, with thousands of students enrolling in the programmes, further research is needed to explore the “how to” of the instructional design in concatenated microlearning with a more longitudinal approach, from the perspective of an overall curriculum programme, namely at the macro level.
To address this knowledge gap, we thus propose the following research questions: What are the best practices for designing and implementing a macrolearning programme in business education?

The purpose of this paper is to explore the best practices for microlearning design and implementation when accumulating hundreds of microlearning objects to form a macrolearning programme.

The empirical evidence has been collected by conducting 12 in-depth interviews with students who have participated in a microlearning program of around 300 videos, developed by an EdTech player.

By exploring multiple dimensions that affect the design and implementation of effective microlearning solutions, results reveal that the most valued dimensions are those of a technical profile, with the technological platform in first place, followed by interface design. These are followed by institutional aspects, pedagogical aspects, and student support. At a third level the ethical aspects, participation, and assessment are cited and interactivity in last place.

Keywords:

Microlearning, macrolearning, education, higher education, EdTech startup.