Propel Professional Learning

  Microlearning in the Library  By Linda Martin and Carrie M. Cannella   Linda is tutoring a student who recently got a new job and now simultaneously has less time for studying and is more anxious to progress quickly in his studies. They have been talking about how to shift gears and how to learn more in less time: the constant struggle with adult learners balancing all of life’s responsibilities.  Around the same time, Propel colleagues started a discussion group about a book called Microlearning: Short and Sweet , by Karl Kapp and Robyn Defelice (learn more about the book from this podcast ). Linda jumped on board, thinking this might be the magic bullet—a way to compress her student’s lessons. She realized that there is no magic bullet; microlearning can’t replace the deeper study her student was working on. Yet she has found microlearning to be an effective addition for the learning, teaching, and tutoring repertoire.  This post will focus on how Prope...

What’s the Buzz About Microlearning?  By Rebecca Sherry  Microlearning. Maybe you heard this word at a recent conference. Perhaps you’ve tried out some of Propel’s microlearning offerings like Mental Health Mondays or TSTM-E’s Nine Skills Microlearning Minute . But what is microlearning, and how and why do we use it as an instructional tool? In this blog post, we’re going to investigate those questions and introduce you to some resources for implementing microlearning in your teaching. You will also see some microlearning examples embedded throughout this article as a way to demonstrate how this tool works in practice.   Microlearning Explained   Let’s start by defining microlearning. In their book Microlearning: Short and Sweet, authors Karl Kapp and Robyn Defelice (2019) synthesize several definitions found in the research in this way: Microlearning is an instructional unit that provides a short engagement in an activity intentionally designed to elicit ...