Microlearning to support authentic learning in continuing education and for engineering students

Abstract

In today’s rapidly changing society, there is a growing demand for learning for innovation in organisations and engineering education. The increased global competition requires organisations and individuals to be qualified to quickly respond to changes in the market. Organisations and individuals must be capable of innovating - defining and solving novel, complex problems for which often no previous knowledge exists.
This paper is about microlearning as a format for learning in continuing engineering education to foster the use of authentic learning in dealing with real-world issues and innovation at the level of higher engineering education (HEE). The authors of this paper see learning as a contextual lifelong learning process which enables the construction of knowledge, finding new solutions to problems, creating connections between experiences, participation and learner control of the content and the process.
The microlearning method was developed to support predominantly informal learning activities in or close to the workplace, while avoiding the drawbacks of informality [3]. Microlearning helps to structure an on-demand approach to learning and performance in a flexible and self-directed way and facilitates organising short-cyclical learning practices at the workplace. From the experiences in the business environment it is assumed that microlearning has a lot of potential to stimulate the use of authentic learning in HEE [4]. Authentic learning practices in education have many benefits, as they bring real world problems, constraints and solution strategies in to the classroom. These learning practices though are not always easy to incorporate in existing teaching praxis, as they are time consuming, difficult to organise, expensive or too complicated. Microlearning supplies a format that help to facilitate authentic learning from a content and organizational point of view.