Author: Lilia Valieva

In a world where people are checking their smartphones 9 times an hour, competition for learner’s attention is extra fierce. According to KnowledgeGuru, recent learning trends such as mobile, gamification, game-based learning, performance support, use of learning science and interactive video are all attempts to capture learner attention and engage them on a deeper level. Among relatively new trends is microlearning which is arguably the most effective technique for today’s students.

Kirstie Greany, Senior Learning Consultant at Elucidat defines microlearning as breaking a large chunk of information into small sections which is target or specific outcome based. Microlearning is mostly associated with e-learning which delivers bite-sized specific pieces of content to an audience, when and where they need it. Microlearning content can be in the form of a presentation, activity, game, discussion, video, quiz, book chapter, or any other format from which someone learns. Typically, these self-contained information nuggets range in duration from 1 to 15 minutes and are usually focused on one or two tightly defined learning objectives, unlike conventional e-learning units that can take up to 60 minutes.

Tom Spiglanin, Ph.D. scientist turned learning strategist/designer in Aerospace University, the educational division of the Aerospace Corporation, describes microlearning as a one-objective product that needn’t navigation and doesn’t have inherently complex structure. Spiglanin points it out that microlearning units are not simply chunked learning content. As a part of a larger product, such unit of learning content may require knowledge or context provided by earlier chunks in the overall sequence, while microlearning, in contrast, stands alone and provides its own context where needed.

Holly Clark, an Education Strategist from San Diego, California, a Google Certified Innovator and National Board Certified Teacher, thinks highly of microlearning: ‘This learning is frequently fueled by curiosity and inquiry. A deep dive results in richer understanding through actual examples and rapid fire metacognitive thinking’.

Clark highlights key points why microlearning is so revolutionary. Among others, the list includes notifications that lead to rich conversations and crucial information, new connections that are organic and not forced and quick creative inspiration. However, easy access and on demand information are the benefits of microlearning that are pointed out by most of educators and learning strategists.

According to Clark, ‘easy access’ implies that learning channels are open to everyone without applying for a special programme or paying exorbitant fees for classes, while ‘on demand information’ means one can get as much information as they want when they want it and control amount of time spent consuming learning material.

Microlearning units tend to be better than larger modules for just-in-time support, Greany agrees. When one needs a refresher on particular material, it is much more convenient to watch a 2 minutes video on this particular topic rather than to wade through a 60-minute module that covers all the related information. These bite-size nuggets can also be used flexibly, being combined and consumed depending on learner’s preferences.  Learners only have to work through the topics that are meaningful to them, and access them in an order that meets their immediate needs.

Connie Malamed, the author of the Instructional Design Guru app and the book Visual Language for Designers, also sees such benefits as immediate results, effective microlearning enabling people to quickly close a small knowledge or skill gap (e.g. some universities are using a microlearning strategy to help students learn about collaborative and social technologies) and quick achievements: because people can typically process around four bits of information at a time, it’s easier for a learner to achieve success from a short learning intervention. It is also notable that e-learning pieces designed to be meaningful in a short session (10-15 minutes) lead to better performance. As work by Dr. Paul Kelley has shown, intense 20-minute bursts of study, separated by 10-minute breaks, can yield better long-term memory retention than longer, continuous periods of study.

Summing up all the benefits of microlearning, it is fair to say this approach saves time, energy and money. However, effectiveness of microlearning has been debated within the learning industry, as short pieces of content don’t necessarily equal good learning or improved performance.

Malamed draws our attention to the fact that there is insufficient research to know whether microlearning is an effective strategy for reaching long-term learning goals, for which microlearning interventions could end up as content fragments that are not tied together. There is also imminent potential for confusion as microlearning solution requires from learners an ability to switch between a wide variety of formats. Last but not least, microlearning might appear to be lacking cognitive synthesis, as educators can’t be certain that learners will synthesize content from bits of information well enough to construct appropriate mental models.

It is also crucial to analyze when the audience and content can benefit from extreme chunking, and therefore well-designed microlearning can be a good strategy. Sharon Bollen, Ed.D., professor Emerita of Art  in the Department of Art, Fine Art and Art Education and a consultant of the Mount’s Art Education program, is certain that not all training fits the microlearning mode, some skills are not meant to be acquired in 5 to 15 minutes per day. She believes that microlearning is not useful when people need to learn complex skills, processes, or behaviors, such as project management, agile software development and processes, instructional design, any software tool or teamwork skills. What is more important, she writes, education industry needs ‘better clarity on when we need to formally train people, when we need to reinforce knowledge or skills people are building on their own, and when we simply need to keep key principles or practices front and center’.

At its best, microlearning helps learners build long term memory as well as enhance knowledge they already have and provides immediate access to short, targeted lessons and support materials. In the right context and done with the overall experience in mind, microlearning can be highly effective, while at its worst, it can be another distraction to ignore.

The thing is that today when we speak about a degree as a means to build a career, we speak about university rankings and well-known university brands rather than about actual level of skills development. For example, it is often the case that graduating from Harvard does not really say anything about the student’s practical skills or ability to contribute to a real world organization. Instead, it signals the world of potential employers that they were accepted to such a reputable institution as Harvard. In short, the current paradigm puts too little emphasis on mechanisms for measuring knowledge, skills and expertise (such as work portfolios) and way too much emphasis on the brand value of higher educational institution.

This certainly counts well in favour of Coursera, EdX and the like. An increasing number of public universities started offering dramatically lower cost Master’s Degrees on MOOC platforms over the past year, which is a big step in the right direction. As thousands of universities and established companies turn to the online education platforms to offer their courses, this will continue to enhance the credibility of online learning and shift the assessment of education from an emphasis on brand name to more direct evaluations of knowledge.

All this sounds good in theory but the reality is so far not as rosy as it may seem. Although MOOC platforms show a great potential to increase diversity of courses, the reality is that they have moved away from niche courses in the liberal arts to focus on courses that get the biggest audiences, such as ones on clearly marketable skills like computer programming.

The question of low costs is also nuanced. While entry-level courses that take 4-12 hours cost close to nothing, degrees that take 2-4 years to complete cost money, starting off at 9,000 USD. Although this is less than is charged by universities for campus-based courses, it still strains the wallet and does not fully solve the problem of student debt burdens.

Last but not least, although the credibility for the certificates and degrees offered by the MOOC platforms is growing, they are still generally perceived as valuable additions to your resume, rather than a full-fledged equivalent to a college degree.

According to Levine, this poses a threat of splitting the world of higher education in “two kinds of education.” One is more likely to be full time and end in degrees – it will be likely to be more expensive and will therefore be selected by wealthy students, while the other, online model will be available much more cheaply to populations that can’t afford the first kind of education. In other words, this system will promote inequality rather than provide all students with equal opportunities.

Some experts disagree with this grim view on the new world brought in by Coursera and the like. Debora Spar, senior associate dean of Harvard Business School Online, believes that “our physical campuses, like cathedrals of an earlier age, could become historical relics — cherished, yes, and still used, but no longer central to the educational mission.” She believes that although small groups will still select – and pay for – the bundled undergraduate experience (four years, on campus, with education plus everything else), the majority will switch to “an a la carte model” offered by the MOOC platforms.

“Most critically, our job is to acknowledge the inequities that mark our existing structures of higher education, and then harness the power of digital technologies to imagine something better,” Spar concludes. “Something that breaks the strangleholds of physical capacity and high fixed costs to deliver education that is affordable, accessible, and intellectually exciting.”

One of the interesting facts about higher education during the pandemic: last year, when we saw traditional enrollments in higher education decline, enrollments in non-traditional providers – such as Coursera, EdX and other massive open online courses (MOOCs) – boomed. Does that mean the learning paradigm will be changed forever? Or can traditional colleges and universities compete with companies like Coursera?

When two Stanford University professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, started Coursera in 2012, leading universities had little interest in teaching their own students via the online format. Back then, the project’s focus was on building free online courses to bring teaching from elite colleges out to the world. The target market was people who couldn’t get to a traditional campus, so the project did not have a revenue model or offer degrees.

Today, it is a major online education platform that serves students in North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. It provides students around the world with thousands of free and low-cost courses, from more than 300 universities and companies. The courses from various domains, ranging from computer science to cooking are offered by the best educators from the well-known schools, such as Columbia University, Carnegie Mellon University, and Duke University. Industry partners, such as Cisco, Intel, and IBM, offer working professionals certificates and specializations. Employees can also upskill with training opportunities offered through corporate partners such as Airbus, L’Oréal, and PayPal. HR experts admit that a certificate, specialization, or degree from Coursera adds value to the student’s CV, thus offering an affordable and convenient way to advance their career.

The current Coursera business model now generates revenues from subscriptions, verified certificates, and degrees. In March 2021, the company went public. What preceded that is the fact that in the spring of 2020, as colleges across the country shut down, enrollments at Coursera were four to five times higher than usual. According to the company, more than 3,000 universities across the world, resource-constrained institutions among them, had expressed interest in putting their own courses online, aiming to re-bundle their offerings in a less expensive way.

One of the key trends behind these changes is the digital revolution putting more power in the hands of learners, while control the colleges had over the market gradually slips. According to Arthur Levine, a distinguished scholar at New York University and president emeritus of Columbia University’s Teachers College, measuring learning by time in seats will gradually transition to outcome-based education. Degrees won’t necessarily be the dominant form of credential anymore as students turn to “just-in-time education” that quickly provides them with the skills for microcredentials they need for the labor market. In his book “The Great Upheaval,” co-written with Scott Van Pelt, the associate director of the communications program at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, he explains that present-day students prioritize personalized education and low prices. Accustomed to getting what they need 24/7 in other spheres of life, they are not willing to acquire a whole expensive degree programme, when what they actually need is an opportunity to take things that are going to be most important to their futures, rather than a whole series of unrelated courses.

Although MOOC platforms do not create educational materials, but partner with numerous university partners and companies to offer quite an impressive catalogue of courses and degrees. “Platforms are very, very good at creating more diversity, not less,” argues Jeff Maggioncalda, Coursera CEO. “They do really good at niches, because even if there are only 1,000 people in the world who want a course on ‘the structural issues of glued plywood,’ or whatever, no one would ever want to make a course for that because it’s not big enough. But if you get to the global audience, it would be.”

Moreover, Coursera has courses from the top education content providers from around the world, including universities and companies that are reputable in the given area of knowledge – such as Google in IT. Such courses take much less time to complete than a traditional degree programme offered by a regional university or a community college that a student can alternatively afford to increase their odds of finding a decent job. What is even more important, this degree will not probably add anything to their resume. “So what would a Google certification be worth to me as a person who earned it versus a credential, a degree from my local regional university?” asks Levine. And he goes on, “Everybody’s heard of Google,” while a local communityt college might be regarded as an institution for mediocre people.

To many, social media and education may seem like unlikely bedfellows. Formal design education is mostly localized, taking place inside of institution walls. It’s an opportunity to study, learn, experiment, and grow, and to do so within a community that can provide critical feedback. By contrast, Instagram is global, instant, and addictive. It’s not exactly designed to encourage constructive responses or thoughtful discourse. When it comes to graphic design, it favors polished end products over the messiness of process and the realness of failure.

But Instagram has also proven to be an excellent platform for finding highly specific communities of like-minded people, geographic boundaries be damned. Unlike higher education, it’s available to anyone with an internet connection. And when used inside of an educational context, it can help forge connections—between people, between styles—and grant access to designers and aesthetic traditions that fall outside the often limited range of the traditional canon.

As the social media platform tailor-made for visual media, it’s no surprise that Instagram is having an undeniable effect on style and form in contemporary design. In many ways, the classroom is an ideal place to make sense of this shift. So how can education and Instagram be used together to take stock of this moment in design and further the field?

This is the overarching question we posed to three design educators from three North American institutions, who we invited to discuss this sprawling topic, starting with how and why they use Instagram in their own classrooms.

Meet the educators: Cem Eskinazi is an educator at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and a type designer at Occupant Fonts. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island. On Instagram he’s @cemeskinazi.

YuJune Park is a professor and associate director of BFA Communication Design at Parsons School of Design and a co-founder of Synoptic Office. She lives in New York, New York. On Instagram she’s @synopticoffice.

Dori Tunstall is the dean of the faculty of design at Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) University and a design anthropologist. She lives in Toronto, Canada. On Instagram she’s @deandori_ocadu.

YuJune Park: What I think is super fascinating is how, year after year, there seems to be an increase in comfort, and I might even say preference, for connecting online rather than in person. Putting aside my own concerns about what this says about our society, I do find Instagram to be helpful in terms of building community and being able to share feedback in a way that oftentimes feels more open and honest than what my students might be willing to say in person or in class. I think Instagram is most powerful when it’s used to build community. It can become a bit of a virtual village center for my students. I have them create an Instagram account just for our class, and then use it to post daily progress on projects. It’s been extraordinarily successful in terms of having an ongoing dialogue.

Dori Tunstall: The platform has been an important tool for me in making the position of the dean more accessible. I’m @deandori_ocadu, and I post #deandrag every morning. I explain what I’m wearing and what I’m doing during the day. That’s so all of my students understand what the role of the dean is within the institution, and hopefully it helps them to navigate the system of the institution a little better. It makes them feel like they can come up to me easily because they liked my sunglasses or the scarf I was wearing.

Cem Eskinazi: At RISD, professors use Instagram to track the individual projects of students—it’s a good tool for updates. The graphic design department also has an official Instagram account, which students will take over from time to time. It gives them the opportunity for exposure, which is what a lot of students are looking for from Instagram. We also try to assign projects that ask students to make things for Instagram so that we can bring the platform into the critique, take it seriously, and ask higher-level questions.

“It can become a bit of a virtual village center for my students.”

Tunstall: I find it really fascinating the way in which students are playing with static images to give them a sense of motion and a sense of activity: animating graphics with motion, Boomerangs, Gifs…

Park: I recently read an article on the history of the poster. It was interesting to think about a certain cultural moment in time when posters in England were specifically for making pronouncements. In every historical moment there’s been a platform for self-promotion, with the goal of communicating to the widest audience possible. Today, Instagram has become that.

Tunstall: Instagram post is the new poster!

Park: Basically! Instagram is to the post just like, you know, the town square in late 1800s London was to the poster.

One thing I’ve noticed as an overall trend is that form used to be something that you experienced in a moment. When you think of the poster, it’s this static medium. But design is increasingly becoming experiential, and it asks to be a form that people can interact with. Of course, you see static images on Instagram, and they’re designed to be legible and bold at the small scale of a phone frame. But then you also see really amazing things happening with Instagram Stories, which is about form as it happens over time—and kind of this mashup of real life and graphic gestures.

Tunstall: Another tool that I find very valuable is live-streaming. A lot of times I’ll live-stream events so that the students who follow me have access to them. Or they won’t know it’s going on until they see the stream, and then they’ll show up later. It’s a feature that shifts the emphasis to community, because it works in conjunction with being in a place and engaging in an actual experience.

Park: Right. At Parsons, we have limited shared design labs, but we don’t have desk space for every student. Virtual space is the only space that can accomodate everyone together. And we’re an extraordinarily privileged school in many ways. For schools with less resources for art and design than ours, the vast majority of students have even less physical studio space. So while Instagram will never be able to build community in the way a physical space would, it does offer other opportunities for engagement with like-minded makers.

I find Instagram to be much less useful from a design education standpoint when it’s used in the way that Pinterest is used: for passive consumption. It’s like a coffee-table book with beautiful images and no essays. I find it to be more interesting when it’s used almost like a phonebook—a way to connect with other people.

Tunstall: It’s amazing to see communities of color finding their own artistic community on Instagram. You see that on Twitter, too, in the form of conversations, but on Instagram you see it really strongly in regards to visual media.

One important aspect of the work that I do is helping people recognize that there are multiple modes of excellence in different cultural aesthetic traditions. Take the African diaspora, for example. On Instagram you can easily find work that’s happening in Africa, in the Caribbean, in North America. You can see the work that’s being done by people who have traditionally been marginalized from mainstream magazines or big design competitions. So Instagram can be used to build internal community, but also to broaden access to different aesthetic traditions.

Park: It’s making the design community both more localized and more globalized. You are able to find people who share your vision for design. First, the geographical boundaries need to be broken down, but then this world can get very specific. Maybe you’re connecting with somebody 2,000 miles away and you both have a specific research interest and you’re able to build off each other. I find that to be really encouraging.

Teaching has changed so much even in the 15 years since I’ve been in school. The whole master/apprentice model has kind of gone away. There’s been this radical flattening of that hierarchy, and I think Instagram has a role in that. There’s so much more room for different voices, and I find that incredibly exciting.

“I find Instagram to be more interesting when it’s used almost like a phonebook—a way to connect with other people.”

Tunstall: I do think it’s a very powerful tool for flattening the hierarchy. We have a huge diversity of students and having access to many different influences is really, really important in terms of making them feel like they belong in design.

To an extent, we are still teaching a version of the Bauhaus, which comes from a particular place in a particular time within a particular history. We’re now beginning to dismantle and deconstruct it, but students still feel a very real pressure to be like European designers. Social media helps create a sense that there isn’t that kind of hierarchy anymore—there’s so many other ways to be inspired. There’s so many other people that you can connect with and find guidance from as you develop your own work.

Park: Right, and people say, “Oh, but Instagram is overly curated.” But since when has the history of design education not been? There’s always been the canon. Instagram at least gives the chance for everyone to be invited to the table.

Eskinazi: But there’s another side to that as well. I teach sophomores, and I can see that it’s challenging for younger students because there’s a level of performance anxiety. They have to put themselves out there to join this conversation, but it’s not always the safest space.

Tunstall: I always think of the performative aspect more as “curation,” though, and I think that can be useful, too. To some degree, Instagram is your digital portfolio in your pocket. When you’re a young designer networking with people, being able to pull out your phone and show the best of your work and talk about the process behind what you’re doing makes you more memorable to people.

Eskinazi: One of the challenges that I’m having with my students is that with the rapid mode of consumption right now—just looking at image after image after image—I feel like they are losing their criticality a bit. Platforms like Instagram are super sleek, and it doesn’t really allow for that the friction needed to ask critical questions. It privileges quantity over quality, and in that sense, it’s hard to bring the conversation back to, “What is this work really saying?” That’s been the biggest challenge for me, to pull students back from it a bit and make them understand that design is actually a process and not just the end product. Instagram really values that end product. It’s kind of like objectifying design.

Tunstall: I actually find that students mostly use Instagram to document their processes. Maybe they come with very polished images at the end, but for the majority of my students, if they’re not posting selfies, they’re posting pictures of process, and their community is responding. They’re looking for feedback: Is this a process that seems to be working? If not, why is it not working?

“Platforms like Instagram are super sleek, and it doesn’t really allow for that the friction needed to ask critical questions.”

Park: I have similar challenges as Cem with students appropriating styles that, on a gut level, they find beautiful or compelling in some way. But they aren’t really asking the deeper questions: Why do they gravitate to that style? What social, political, and cultural factors merged to create a style like that?

Form doesn’t come from nowhere. Dori mentioned the Bauhaus earlier—there’s a reason Bauhaus design looks the way it does. It came up during a post-war era when there was a search for a utility of form. When students appropriate a style without that knowledge or criticality, I find it makes them less effective visual communicators.

Eskinazi: Platforms like Instagram are shaping the way we tell stories and changing the way we construct narratives. For my generation and the generation that’s getting educated right now, the prominent style of design is very appropriation-based and reference-heavy. There’s a culture of collaging different narratives together, juxtaposing image and text, or incorporating motion. It encourages people to use more found material, and, in a sense, puts less of an emphasis on originality.

I don’t want to problematize this way of making—this collaging of narratives, or even the act of frantically consuming media. I think it’s very interesting, and I’m excited for my students to explore it. This is a generation that was born with the internet, and this is how we communicate and make things. As an educator, my point of view had been always to accept this fact and say, “Okay, this is how the world is right now, this is what the new generation of designers are given. So how can we work with what we have?” But it also requires a new heightened sense of criticality. Because we are taking and reusing things more than ever, we need to be asking where these images came from and what they mean.

“Form doesn’t come from nowhere.”

Park: Design is always going to be an expression and a reflection of how people at a certain moment in time saw the world. You see more of this collaging and appropriation of styles, and a mashup of visual styles together in one design, because that’s how we consume content now. You go online and you’re going to see 10 different styles on a page at once. You have styles from the pop-up ads on sites to the style of the site itself. We live in a mashup world—that’s how we interface with content now. Now our question is, “How do we do this type of design thoughtfully?” What I find concerning is when students do these mashups of appropriated material without asking critical questions about how these narratives are coming together, and how they influence one another. That can be dangerous.

Tunstall: But when you have a strong discourse around decolonization in the classroom—what it is, what it means, and how it relates to indigenous appropriation and misappropriation—you’re encouraging students to question what it means to engage with and use something respectfully. When it comes to use and reuse, what are the relationships of collaboration that needs to happen? What are the boundaries of homage versus appropriation? What are the conversations—and this is the emphasis that we make at OCAD—that you need to have with communities or individuals from whom you want to borrow? To engage respectfully, you have to be in direct conversation and have a dialogue, and in many ways Instagram facilitates this.

When reuse, appropriation, and misappropriation happen on social media platforms, our students engage in that critically. They would be the first ones to call out, “Hey, are you appropriating indigenous imagery? Did you get permission to do that? Have you spoken to the artists that you’re borrowing from?” They’re already aware of what’s happening on social media, so the thing that the institution is providing is the language with which to talk about it. How you engage in these discussions in the classroom ends up spilling over into how they engage in the conversations over social media.

Eskinazi: I was thinking of appropriation and reuse a bit differently. I tend to frame this under the discussion of style: When students see a typeface they like, or a particular form pop up on Instagram, they may think it looks cool and decide to use it. But this heightened sense of criticality that we’re talking about tries to go beyond just reading an image. It also goes deep into the questions of “What does a certain use of a typeface or a drop shadow say about your work? Where did you get that?” These kinds of questions are becoming more important.

Park: I agree. The conversation I tend to have on a day-to-day level with my students actually has more to do with style and its relationship to social, political, cultural, and historical moments in time. I would like to see more research and unpacking of why a form looks the way it does. In what period was it made? What factors led to it looking that way?

“Because we are taking and reusing things more than ever, we need to be asking where these images came from and what they mean.”

Tunstall: Right, but the conversation you’re talking about is exactly what we mean by “decolonization,” right? Pointing out that particular practices come from a time and a place and a history. And normally that history is rooted in colonization, in slavery. So let’s unpack that and then bring in alternative perspectives. Design is not neutral. It always comes from a time and a place and a politics that you have to engage with in order to figure out how you can best be respectful.

This roundtable interview was first published in Eye on Design Magazine, issue #05: Distraction.