English

Edvertisements: Adding Microlearning to Social News Feeds and Websites

Human-Computer Interaction 2021-02-04 v1

Abstract

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.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2102.01865,
  title  = {Edvertisements: Adding Microlearning to Social News Feeds and Websites},
  author = {Geza Kovacs},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.01865},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Extended version of "FeedLearn: Using facebook feeds for microlearning", which was published as an extended abstract at CHI 2015

R2 v1 2026-06-23T22:47:19.325Z