Nanolearning: The Future of Learning

The learners of tomorrow will learn more from Snapchat than school, more from Youtube than libraries, and more from Tik Tok than the NY Times. They’ll get their information from short sound bites, just long enough to hold the minute-long attention spans of a generation that never knew life without smartphones.

This is the part where many used to traditional learning will immediately click out of the article. Surely a few seconds, minutes, or sentences can’t actually… teach us anything of substance?

In reality, this couldn’t be further from the truth. If you’re still with us, let’s dive in:

Welcome to the rise of nanolearning, or delivering short form, low friction content to learners in engaging platforms or formats. Put simply, nanolearning is done in a few seconds or sound bites via platforms like Twitter, Tik Tok, or text messages.

Nanolearning is already taking place, so how can the context of a formal education adapt? We’ll have to rethink content, credentials, and assessments. How we learn, who we trust, and how we know we’ve learned, will never be the same.

How content will change

Nanolearning doesn’t have the luxury of ornate lecture halls and blocked schedules. It has to catch learners where they are, and hook them immediately.

The best tweets start only with an insight and the best Tik Toks with a piece of humor or surprising statement. Educators will need to get to the point, or become irrelevant.

All of these platforms that power nanolearning will have enforced content limits, so you can’t publish too much. Tik Toks can’t be longer than a minute, tweets longer than 240 characters, and Arist texts longer than two screen lengths.

Read: How to Build a Text Message Course

While limited in length, these short bursts will be nearly frictionless. Learners will engage via scrolling up or down, or unlocking their screen. This means educational content will be more widely opened, read, and shared than ever before.

With less barriers for the learner come less barriers for the educator. Content will be far easier to produce and deploy. Topics will be more relevant and adaptable than we’ve ever seen. If smart contracts were invented Monday morning, you could have sharable content before lunch.

That presents a unique challenge: in an age where everyone can make content, who do we trust to do the teaching?

How credentialing and expertise will change

Academia has the blessing and curse of long approval processes, both for content and for experts. Papers must be published and peer-reviewed, professors have PhDs and receive tenure, and this ensures qualified people teach accurate information.

While this is ideal for specialist learning, most learning we do is generalist. In other words, we’re looking for an overview of a subject, and enough that we’re familiar in our jobs and lives.

The most in-demand skills, from leadership to public speaking to software engineering, are widely known by millions of people.

For nanolearning, legitimacy will not be given by an academic institution, but an amassed following. Experts will have great subject expertise, sure, but also great communication and course design skills. They’ll be judged not by their degrees, but their followers, students, experience, or successful outcomes.

Millions of people already learn about emotional intelligence from Simon Sinek, or startups from Michael Seibel. Their expertise is in their ability to communicate, lead, influence, and translate their teachings into successful outcomes. Do you know where they went to school? Neither do I.

While the way these individuals teach is inspiring, it leaves us with another unique challenge: their thought leadership seldom becomes full fledged, measurable coursework. How do we actually know people have learned anything?

Nanolearning forces us to redefine what we consider learning. It’s designed to teach us when we haven’t dedicated months or years to pursuing a single degree. Learning isn’t just about remembering information, but building habits and developing skills.

How learning assessment will change

Short bursts sound great, but can feel haphazard or random. How can we actually measure that people are learning at all?

Let’s say you’re starting a new job as a manager, and in tandem want to learn how to be a better business professional. Maybe you’re looking at online classes in business acumen, workplace ethics, and negotiations.

Every morning on your commute to work, you receive short bites of information about ethical dilemmas and cases, causing you to think deeply and respond how you’d react in a similar scenario. You’re also given 3 minute meditations, to help you feel calmer and lead to less conflict.

At lunch, you receive that day’s strategies on how to be a better negotiator. Your task? To pair up with a colleague nearby, and convince them to give you their lunch. You’ll both be required to submit feedback.

By the train home, you’re receiving pieces of info about business do’s and don'ts. In four days, a short quiz will be sent along, and you’ll have to apply this knowledge to a short case.

As you can see, the days of learning from a textbook to take an exam are over. Only in certain cases do we assess a learner by memory or quiz scores. In many subjects, this isn’t ideal. We can teach by building habits and skills, and measure success by ratings from colleagues or surveys about mental well-being.

What does this mean for the future of learning?

In short, a fundamental restructuring of how we teach everything. Academic institutions will remain a place to build networks and subject expertise, but general knowledge will be handed over to systems of nanolearning. Thankfully, this will make a lot of education more accessible (read: cheaper) than we ever thought possible.

Teachers will play an essential role in this society. With a wealth of information online, they’ll no longer be lecturers, but master curators. This new structure will need to bridge the gap between leading experts and strong communication and pedagogy. Teachers will learn fast, be highly adaptable, and instruct effectively.

Along with expertise, this system will need playbooks and guidelines for teaching effectively. Creators who can work with educators to structure nanolearning coursework en-mass will make a fortune.

Finally, this new system will need more tools than ever to power nanolearning. Tik Tok and Twitter show signs of promise, but were not built as structured learning environments. Content can be random, and learning impossible to measure.

At Arist, we’ve build the first text message learning platform, allowing anyone to build a text message course that seizes the power of nanolearning. Educators can meet students and employees in SMS, WhatsApp, WeChat, etc. and build, deploy, and assess course work. We’ve done the heavy lifting of building frameworks and guidelines, removing many traditional barriers to learning design.

In school we’re often taught that change and adaptation is inevitable, and now we’re holding every institution to this same standard. In a learning environment that’s filled with uncertainty, nanolearning will be able to adapt, evolve, assess, and teach with breakneck speed.

Most important of all, nanolearning will fit a world that moves equally as fast. Workers will need to be trained and retrained, learning when they’re young on how to become expert learners, and leaving the rest up to society.

In a way, the only thing we’ll ever need to learn at a young age is how to learn. In a world that changes so fast, why should we ever stop learning?

Read more from our team or see the original post.

To create your own text message course, it takes 30 seconds to get started