Proposed Business Model of a Microlearning-based Platform for Continuing Professional Education of Industry Members

Abstract

The increasing mobility of people, objects and information resources opens up new perspectives for teaching and learning processes, especially for people who carry out their work while being mobile. This research proposes a business model innovation (BMI) in e-learning through a microlearning-based platform for continuing education of professionals. Microlearning is a type of learning based on micro content, that consists of fragmented multimedia content that provides quick responses to an idea envisioned in a previously well-delineated and purposeful scope. Such content may also be used to deal with broad and / or complex subjects by using chaining or sequencing techniques, so the fragments are grouped in a chronological fashion to create a broader idea on the topic being studied, and each fragment must be independent from each other. In addition, this content format has high power to hold the audience's attention and motivate the viewer's engagement. When people are looking for quick answers in video tutorials, they typically skip ahead at intervals of the video timeline until they find the stretch that contains the solution they need. For this reason, the format design of the videos consists of presenting the quick solution at the beginning, then a more detailed demonstration of the solution, accompanied by the theoretical conceptualization when necessary for its understanding. The proposed platform breaks the paradigm of the strongly structured and static teaching-learning process, bringing the possibility of dynamic and personalized reorganization of micro contents.