Serendipity35 - Professional Learning

Andragogy and Microlearning

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 09:40:00 +0000

I have referenced microlearning in earlier posts, but I want to say more about how microlearning works effectively with andragogy (adult learning theory), which differs from the more commonly heard pedagogy (children).

Microlearning provides the flexible format and focused content that perfectly complements the goal-oriented, self-directed nature of the adult learner. (Not that children don't want their learning to be self-directed, but they are less capable of doing that on their own.) Andragogy principles are strengthened by microlearning's ability to combat the forgetting curve. Microlearning often incorporates spaced repetition through short, periodic knowledge checks or quizzes. By revisiting core concepts in brief intervals, the information is reinforced, helping to move the content from short-term to long-term memory, which is vital for busy adult learners who may not have dedicated study time.

Adult learners, by definition, value autonomy and prefer to be self-directed in their education. So, microlearning modules are typically accessed on demand via mobile devices or learning platforms. Much of that learning occurs outside of traditional learning spaces. This allows adults to choose what they need to learn and when it fits into their busy personal and professional schedules, fully supporting their desire to take control of their learning path.

Adults are motivated to learn when the content is immediately relevant and can be applied to solve a real-life problem or job-related task. Each microlearning module is intentionally designed to focus on one specific learning objective. That might be "how to change the blade on a lawn mower," but also 'how to execute X function in the software." This problem-centered focus provides just-in-time training, ensuring the information is practical, immediately useful, and valuable for their current role.

Adults are most ready to learn when they encounter a specific need or challenge in their work or life.

Younger learners are more likely to accept the "authority" of the teacher that something needs to be learned at this time, even if they don't see a need for it themselves. It's not that younger learners don't sometimes do the same kind of "just in time," self-motivated learning. They might search for a video on how to do something when starting a task. But this is more likely to occur with older learners.

Adult learners have accumulated a wealth of experience and are often battling time shortages. They need efficient learning that builds on what they already know. Microlearning usually respects the adult's time by eliminating filler and focusing only on the "need-to-know" core information.

AI chatbots are certainly the latest form of just-in-time microlearning that is being used outside classrooms. Its use is not unlike someone earlier looking for a help video on YouTube, but it is incredibly fast and personalized.

Google AI Essentials Course

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 09:53:00 +0000

I mentioned in an earlier post that everyone in education - students and teachers - says that they use AI in their work, but very few can say they are formally trained or certified in the use of AI.

One option is Google AI Essentials. It is a short and affordable ($49 USD) online course that takes under 10 hours and provides you with an AI training certificate.

The course outline explains that there is a 21x increase in job postings mentioning AI technologies, so this training should give you an edge.

Google AI Essentials can help you discover how you can use AI to assist, empower, and inspire you. Learn how to use generative AI tools to help speed up daily tasks, make more informed decisions, and develop new ideas and content.

A course like this can help you use AI tools to boost your productivity. You can complete the course at your own pace. Zero experience is required

You can get started on Coursera

AI in Online Learning

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 15:16:00 +0000

.Coursera’s CEO, Jeff Maggioncalda, says leveraging AI in online learning is key to a more accessible, flexible education experience. Coursera is a major platform for free and paid, non-credit and credit learning opportunities. Remember MOOCs? The term isn't in as wide usage as it was a decade ago but Coursera was an early serious player in that space and still offers short-form training and master’s degrees from Ivy League institutions like the University of Pennsylvania.

While many in education have been worrying about how AI is and will impact teaching and learning, online providers and course designers have been more likely to embrace AI tools.

Generative AI is good at language translations and Coursera who now has 4,200 courses translated into 17 languages as AI has made the translations easier and more affordable. They have also experimented with using AI for a personalized learning companion (chatbot) named Coach where students can ask for help on a concept, to create practice problems, or summarize activities. It won’t give users the answer, especially during testing.

For course designers, it can create outlines, write learning objectives, and compile lessons into new courses.

Coursera works with partners who can make content available for free.

So You Want To Be An AI Prompt Engineer

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Tue, 21 May 2024 09:51:00 +0000

When I was teaching in a high school, I used to tell students (and faculty) that we were not preparing them for jobs. I was sure many of our students would end up in jobs with titles that did not exist then. There is a song by The Byrds from the 1960s titled "So You Wanna Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star." In 2024, it could be "So You Want To Be An AI Prompt Engineer."

The role of AI prompt engineer attracted attention for its high-six-figure salaries when it emerged in early 2023. What does this job entail? The principal aim is to help a company integrate AI into its operations. Some people describe the job as more prompter than engineer.

There are already tools that work with apps like OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform that can automate the writing process using sets of built-in prompts. Does that mean that AI will replace AI prompt engineers already? For now, the prompter works to ensure that users get the desired results. They might also be the instructors for other employees on how to use generative AI tools. They become the AI support team. AI can automate "trivial" tasks and make more time for work that requires creative thinking.

What kind of training leads to getting this job? You might think a background in computer science, but probably a strong language and writing ability is more important. People who write in the corporate world might justifiably fear AI will take their jobs away. Being a prompter might be an alternative.

Still, I suspect that there is a good possibility that a prompter/engineer's job might be vulnerable as software becomes better at understanding users’ prompts.

If you are interested in being an AI prompt engineer, I posted last week about some free online courses offered by universities and tech companies that included three courses that relate to creating prompts for AI.

AI Applications and Prompt Engineering is an edX introductory course on prompt engineering that starts with the basics and ends with creating your applications.

Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT is a specific 6-module course from Vanderbilt University (through Coursera) that offers beginners a starting point for writing better prompts.

Another course on ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers is offered by OpenAI in collab with DeepLearning and it is taught by Isa Fulford and Andrew Ng. It covers best practices and includes hands-on practice.

Learning AI - Free College-Level Courses

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Mon, 13 May 2024 16:30:00 +0000

If you are interested in taking some free AI courses offered by Google, Harvard, and others, here are 8 you might consider on a variety of approaches. For Coursera courses without the trial, go to the course you want to take and click 'Enroll for free', then 'Audit the course'. You'll need to create an account to take courses, but won't need to pay anything.

Google offers 5 different courses to learn generative AI from the ground up. Start with an Introduction to AI and finish having an understanding of AI as a whole. https://lnkd.in/eW5k4DVz

Microsoft offers an AI course that covers the basics and more. Start with an introduction and continue learning about neural networks and deep learning. https://lnkd.in/eKJ9qmEQ

Introduction to AI with Python from Harvard University (edX) is a full 7-week course to explore the concepts and algorithms of AI. It starts with the technologies behind AI and ends with knowledge of AI principles and machine learning libraries. https://lnkd.in/g4Sbb3nQ

LLMOps are Large Language Model Ops offered by Google Cloud in collaboration with DeepLearning. Taught by Erwin Huizenga, it goes through the LLMOps pipeline of pre-processing training data and adapt a supervised tuning pipeline to train and deploy a custom LLM.

Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Ethics is a 4-module course offered by Coursera from the University of California - Davis that covers big data and introduces IBM's Watson as well as learning about big data opportunities and knowing the limitations of AI. I think the inclusion of ethics is an important element.

AI Applications and Prompt Engineering is an edX introductory course on prompt engineering that starts with the basics and ends with creating your applications.

Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT is a specific 6-module course from Vanderbilt University (through Coursera) that offers beginners a starting point for writing better prompts.

1970s Computer Clubs

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 11:55:00 +0000

The Apple 1 as displayed at the Computer History Museum

On March 5, 1975, the Homebrew Computer Club first met in a garage near Menlo Park in Silicon Valley, California.

On that day, I was across the country in my last semester at Rutgers. I had taken one course in computer programming, using Fortran, which had been around in some earlier forms since the late 1950s. We used a box of punch cards to create a program. I had looked into the class as an auditor, for no credit and not on my transcript, because I had talked to the professor after an information session he gave, and he was curious to see what an English major would do in his class.

My afterschool and vacation job in high school was doing printing for a liquor distributor. They had a room with huge computers using tape drives and cards, and I would sometimes wander in there and talk to the operator. Of course, I understood nothing about what he was doing. He was in a unique place in that position because no one in the company understood what he was doing except him and his one assistant. And yet those computers, printed all the invoices which I would later have to box up and file in the warehouse. Though they were using the computer to print them all, no one could access that data from their desktop, so if someone wanted a copy of an invoice, they had to dig through a file cabinet.

That 1970 computer was certainly not for personal use, and no one had a personal computer because they did not exist. Most of my fellow students didn't imagine we would ever have a computer in our home. They were gigantic — a computer easily took up an entire room. And they were very, very expensive, costing about a million dollars each. Not even computer engineers or programmers who made a living working on computers had access to a personal computer.

So this California club served a real need for tech-minded people But many of these tech-minded people wanted to build personal computers for fun. And they decided to start a hobbyist club to trade circuit boards and information and share their enthusiasm. Among the early members were high school friends Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Eventually, they would design and build what tey called the Apple I and II computers and brought them to the club to show them off. Lee Felsentein and Adam Osborne were also members and would create the first mass-produced portable computer, the Osborne 1.

Wozniak would write "The theme of the club was 'Give to help others.' Each session began with a 'mapping period,' when people would get up one-by-one and speak about some item of interest, or a rumor, and have a discussion. Somebody would say, 'I've got a new part,' or somebody else would say he had some new data or ask if anybody had a certain kind of teletype."

I started teaching in a junior high school, in the fall of 1975, and shortly thereafter, the school got a terminal that was connected to a mainframe at some university in New Jersey. It was first used by one of the math teachers for a kind of computer club. I did go to his classroom a few times just to see how it worked but I saw no connection to what I had learned about programming in college.

It would be a few years before the first personal computers appeared in the school We had a lab that was used for the first actual computer class. It was a classroom full of standalone TRS 80s. TRS stands for Tandy RadioShack, though later they were nicknamed Trash 80s. I took a professional development class using those computers where we learned to program in BASIC. I created a vocabulary flashcard program that I was able to use with a few of my English classes during periods when the lab was not being used by the math teacher. The program was crude. The graphics were basically nonexistent, but the kids and I found it very interesting.

I remember one teacher who was in the professional development class, saying we will all have to learn to program in the future. I was sure she was wrong. I had no doubt that computers would play a role in our teaching future, but I was also sure that other people would be writing the programs and we would only be users.

The first computer I had in my classroom was an Apple IIe. Since I had some computer background and more so because I had some interest in learning more, I became the computer coordinator for the building. That meant my computer had two disc drives so that I could copy software that we had purchased and were allowed to copy. MECC was a big source of classroom software back then.

The first computer I bought for home use was the same as what I had in my classroom which made sense because then I could use the software home too. This hardware was expensive. I paid more for the Apple dot matrix printer than I paid for my laptop last year.

We remained an aApple school, and an apple family for a few years until a new person moved into the position of district computer coordinator. He swapped out all the Apple computers for what we would call IBM clones, but we're the early Windows95-equipped computers. When I bought my next computer, it was one using Windows 95.

When I left teaching secondary school in 2000 and went to work at NJIT, all the computers used Windows except for the school of architecture, which was an Apple Mac building. They were their own little tech world. And so I lost contact with the Apple world in those days when even TV commercials and print ads would argue about whether you were a Windows or Mac kind of person. I remember one professor saying to me that he was surprised I was not using a Mac because I seemed like "a creative type."

Microlearning

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 10:02:00 +0000

In my years developing online courses starting at the turn of the century, we discovered quickly that students had no interest in recorded 90-minute lectures on tapes, CDs, DVDs, and eventually online. They hit the fast-forward button frequently.

I had learned in my secondary teaching years before my higher ed years that chunking material was essential. Chunking is the process of breaking down instructional materials into smaller, "bite-sized" pieces and then arranging them in a sequence that makes it easier for your learners to learn the material. Think of how we write phone numbers: 800-289-9246 rather than 8002899246. We do it for dates, we make categories, chapters, heading, subheadings, menus.

The more current term for this seems to be "microlearning" which is used in education and professional development. These short, focused bursts of learning, are often delivered in the form of videos. Proponents will say that this is also effective for time-poor and attention-deficient learners, though that is arguable.

We know that video accounts for the vast majority of Internet traffic. Of course, it's not all learning. In fact, much of it is entertainment, but educators can learn from how entertainment uses video and media. All those short clips from late-night talk shows or Saturday Night Live get far more views than would a full version of the show.

The effectiveness of microlearning depends on a range of factors: the quality of the materials being delivered, the context in which they are being consumed, and the learning objectives of the individual.

Microlearning in education, especially online, can include:
Text (in phrases, short paragraphs)
Images (photos, illustrations)
Videos (of the short variety)
Audio (also short)
Tests and Quizzes (yes, shorter is better)
Games (such as simple single-screen challenges)

MORE
https://www.umass.edu/ctl/resources/how-do-i/how-do-i-chunk-content-increase-learning

https://thepeakperformancecenter.com/educational-learning/thinking/chunking/chunking-as-a-learning-strategy/

https://elearningindustry.com/what-is-microlearning-benefits-best-practices

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Learning to Teach

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 13:40:00 +0000

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a forum newsletter series on teaching written by Beth McMurtrie that had a post recently summarizing what they have learned after 5 years of doing the series. As it states, teaching is "An Ever-Changing Profession" and yet I find that many things about teaching are still the same as when I first went into a classroom in 1975.

When I moved out of the classroom as a full-time teacher in 2000, one of my roles was to teach professors. Though the department I ran was instructional technology, I was also tasked with holding sessions on pedagogy. At first, I wondered if college faculty would have a real interest in topics like assessment, grading strategies, creating assignments, and leading discussions in the classroom or online. But in the early sessions, those who did attend (it was voluntary most of the time) often said things like "I try to do what my best teachers do and not do what the bad ones did" and "I never took any courses in how to teach." Those faculty were interested and had spent their academic lives focused on their subject matter and, especially at STEM institutions like NJIT, research and getting grants were the real foci of concern and attention.

It is noted that "teaching has become an increasingly public enterprise," but some say “teaching is a private act.” Certainly, the K-12 classroom has become more public and parents and the community have always played a greater role in what happens in classrooms than compared in colleges. The newsletter points to possible changes to that dynamic, citing "find a teaching buddy, bring the department together to talk about teaching, create teaching communities across campus."

The pandemic and classes going online K-20 put teaching practices more in the public and into homes. Again, that was more so in K-12, but also for higher ed. Schools also held workshops to help faculty shift their teaching and some virtual support groups appeared with topics ranging from how to use Zoom to how to grade participation online.

Though I "learned to teach" as an undergraduate with an education minor in order to be a certified secondary school teacher, I really learned how in my field experiences and even more so in my first few years of actually being a full-time teacher. Like those professors, it took being in a classroom, creating lessons, grading work, and all the day-to-day tasks for me to really learn to teach. But I did have all the theories, practices, and philosophies before I became a teacher to refer to and use. I had tools.

I used a lot of that training in doing my own training sessions for professors. They were always somewhat amazed at all the research that had been done in pedagogy. They were more surprised at hearing there was such a thing as andragogy which addressed the age group many of them were teaching. It shouldn't have surprised them that there was a vast amount of educational research available, after all, it was what most of them did in their own fields. I always suspected that some of that surprise came from an attitude that teaching was less of a science and more of an "art" - like being able to draw or play an instrument. The "A" in STEAM had not found its way into STEM.

The newsletter has covered research universities creating teaching tracks to try to improve educational outcomes and reduce faculty burnout. Innovative forms of teaching, such as inclusive teaching and active learning, are ways that faculty begin to rethink classroom strategies.