Gnowbe – the Latest Guest to the Platform Party is Distinctly Mobile

In their own words, “Gnowbe is a pioneering mobile micro-learning and engagement solution to help the modern workforce learn faster and better” (Gnowbe, 2018, p. 1). Big claims indeed. Very much a mobile-first platform targeting employers’ Learning and Development departments, Gnowbe’s business model relies on partners developing content for the platform. Gnowbe claims to respond in its design to the literature on “latest science of adult learning, gamification and behavior design” (Gnowbe, 2018, p. 1). Leaving aside the latter two concepts as debatably peripheral to this publication, Gnowbe’s adult learning science premise and resulting product channel concepts like peer and social learning and does so in a time the aforementioned Moodlebook designers must envy. For this is a time where the affordances of a less hard-coded, more format-responsive digital ecosystem enable more variety of media within the one platform and blissfully sans Scorm packages (a joke for the techies). Variety can be good for learning (Kagan & Kagan, 1994) but so is time (Soderstrom, Kerr & Bjork, 2016). However, Gnowbe is hedging its bets on a relatively new – the literature is sparse before the 1990’s – but increasingly trendy concept, Microlearning or, specifically, Mobile (M-) Microlearning.