FeedLearn: Using Facebook Feeds for Microlearning

Geza Kovacs

Abstract: Many long-term goals, such as learning a language, require people to spend a small amount of time each day to achieve them. At the same time, people regularly browse social news feeds in their spare time. Our system, FeedLearn, teaches vocabulary in the context of Facebook feeds, by showing users interactive quizzes they can answer without leaving their feeds. It is implemented as a Chrome extension, as Facebook's API does not currently allow developers to insert interactive content into feeds. In our preliminary user study, we compared Japanese vocabulary learning rates when interactive quizzes were inserted directly into feeds, versus inserting links that lead them to quizzes. Our results suggest that users learn more and engage more with microlearning tasks when quizzes can be done without leaving their feeds.