How Can Higher Education Create, Deliver, and Capture Value Through Microlearning?

Introduction

Consumers, increasingly empowered and connected through social networks, use microlearning units – even unknowingly – naturally and habitually to resolve all kinds of questions and meet their everyday needs in a “micro”, “instant” and “YouTube-style” way, showing preference for consuming educational content in short videos via the mobile phone, pulling the knowledge and information they need when they need it (Hamilton et al., 2021). As education and entertainment merge, giving rise to edutainment, the growth and impact achieved threatens traditional teaching methods in higher education. In turn, greater competition among higher education institutions is promoting the consumerisation of learning, empowering as a consumer the student, who demands what they want to learn, when they want to learn it and in the chosen way (King, 2021).

While there is as yet no consensus on the definition of microlearning (Wang et al., 2021), Taylor and Hung’s (2022) scoping review defines it as “an instructional mode that targets a discrete, highly focused topic or skill, provides small amounts of instruction that can be consumed in a short period of time and may be for immediate use” (Taylor & Hung, 2022, p.17).

The main factors enabling microlearning are mobile devices, social connectedness and time scarcity (Torgeson, 2021). Microlearning has the potential to revolutionise both professional development and education by offering learning opportunities via small bursts of micro materials that can be consumed quickly, when and where one wishes or requires, thereby satisfying the increasing need for perpetual, lifelong learning (Kohnke, 2021).

In its turn, the higher education sector is immersed in a continuous process of digital transformation (Rof et al., 2020; Rof et al., 2023b). The pandemic accelerated this process (Rof et al., 2022b), demonstrating the sector’s adaptive capacity, with 67% of higher education institutions able to continue operating in the digital environment (Marinoni et al., 2020). The adaptive capacity of higher education institutions is also reflected in some of the experiments performed with microlearning, showing positive results in different disciplines (Romanenko et al., 2023;Dolasinski & Reynolds, 2023;Salas-Díaz & González-Bello, 2023).

Beyond the digital transformation of higher education institutions themselves, the reality is that the sector is experiencing turbulent times, or a disruptive moment, as some authors refer to it (Kaplan, 2022; Posselt et al., 2018). There is a set of combined forces that put significant pressure on the sector. First, there is the emergence of new entrants from outside it such as EdTech (educational technologies) players (Rof et al., 2022a), and as an exponent of this trend, digital giants such as Google with its Google Career Certificates initiative (Google, 2023), offering professional training. Then there is the entry of new startups such as ThePowerMBA (ThePowerMBA, 2023a), an initiative explained in greater detail in later sections of this chapter, which offers new attractive value propositions based on microlearning. And last, there are the social networks such as TikTok, where over 360 billion views can be achieved on topics such as personal finance, health and science, among many others, opening a window for “creator educators” who can create their microlearning courses and monetise their corresponding platforms (Bouchard, 2023). A second factor is the change in the expectations of students, who increasingly seek an enhanced and personalised educational experience (Pucciarelli & Kaplan, 2016; Rof et al., 2022b) and for whom microlearning fits perfectly into their lifestyle and learning preferences, evidenced in the fact that it is perceived as a highly attractive learning methodology by 78% of university students (Salas-Díaz & González-Bello, 2023). A third source of pressure in the higher education sector is the increasing acceptance by the labour market of skills certifications or micro-credentials as a complement, and even an alternative, to university and postgraduate degrees (Rof et al., 2023a), and as way to satisfy a growing need for reskilling and upskilling employees, microlearning being one of the preferred ways to do so due to its focus and short duration (Newnham & Dutt, 2023).