Micro-Prompt: A Strategy for Designing Pedagogically Effective Assignment Free Micro-Lectures for Online Education Systems

Micro-lectures (MIL) help learners to learn using learning by doing (LBD) approach. Micro-lectures use assignments to implement LBD. Carefully crafted micro-lectures and their associated assignments induce learning curiosity in learners, resulting in improved learning quality. However, too many assignments deviate learners from learning resulting in the degraded learning quality. Thus, it is hard to manage the tradeoff between the number of micro-lectures and the number of associated assignments in online micro-lecturing, resulting in poor learning quality. This research is the answer to this problem. This research proposes a framework which uses micro-prompts for crafting micro-lectures. Micro-prompts’ purpose is to embed assignment elements in the micro-lectures body. This coerces learners to cover assignment elements during the micro-lecturing process, hence eliminating/reducing the need for external assignments resulting in improved learning quality. To prove our proposed framework’s validity, we conducted a fifteen-days long C programming course for beginners. We lectured them with micro-prompt embedded micro-lectures designed using our proposed framework and observed fantastic results. This paper presents these results. We believe that study of this kind helps online educators to design effective learning ecosystem.