Edvertisements: Adding Microlearning to Social News Feeds and Websites
This work addresses the challenge of consistent daily practice for long-term learning goals, such as language acquisition, for general web users.
This paper developed a browser extension that integrates interactive vocabulary quizzes directly into social news feeds and websites, allowing users to practice without leaving the page. Their study found that users engaged with and learned from these embedded quizzes, with engagement increasing when quizzes were completed directly within their feeds.
Many long-term goals, such as learning a language, require people to regularly practice every day to achieve mastery. At the same time, people regularly surf the web and read social news feeds in their spare time. We have built a browser extension that teaches vocabulary to users in the context of Facebook feeds and arbitrary websites, by showing users interactive quizzes they can answer without leaving the website. On Facebook, the quizzes show up as part of the news feed, while on other sites, the quizzes appear where advertisements normally would. In our user study, we examined the effectiveness of inserting microlearning tasks into social news feeds. We compared vocabulary learning rates when we inserted interactive quizzes into feeds, versus inserting links that lead them to a website where they could do the quizzes. Our results suggest that users engage with and learn from our embedded quizzes, and engagement increases when the quizzes can be done directly within their feeds.