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ABSTRACT
This article is analyzing the meanings of the micro-learning trend, as they have emerged and developed over the last few years. Exploring how the term micro-learning is used to organize and order a set of pedagogical and technological phenomena and concepts in new and interesting ways, it is brought into focus the most popular and widely used learning management platforms that embrace this concept.
KEYWORDS:
Micro-learning, elearning, micro-content
1.Why micro-learning?
Social, economic and technological everyday changes trigger new concepts and strategies which support learning. Education needs transformations in an appropriate way in which we live, work and learn. Recent studies indicate that a short content may increase information retention by 20 %. Researchers at Dresden University of Technology in Germany have launched a study to examine this issue.
It is well known that most e-learning materials format is a piece of content, followed by an evaluation question. The study's goal was to see if students respond better to these questions when they watched several small pieces of content answering many appropriate questions, or when they watched large amounts of content with fewer evaluation sections. So, the e-learning material was sixteen chapters of content and the students were divided into three groups, as following: the first group responded to a question after reading each of the 16 chapters; the second group answered four questions after reading each group of four chapters; group number three received eight questions after each half of the original text. Passing through this first stage, in the second stage students have supported the same test of multiple choice items covering the whole course material.
Results demonstrated that smaller slices content helped participants to better retain information and better perform in each of the two stages:
* the first group took 28 % less time to answer their assessment questions than the third group, and did 20 % better;
* the first group performed 8 % better on the comprehensive test than the second;
* students in the third group had to read again more than three times the number of sections than the first group did;
* in the second stage of the study, the first group accomplished 22.2 % better than the third group and 8.4 % better than...