Inoculating Against an Infodemic: Microlearning Interventions to Address CoV Misinformation

Royal Roads' George Veletsianos received a CIHR Operating Grant in 2020 to research digital misinformation related to COVID-19 and educational interventions to reduce its spread online.

The effort seeks to improve personal health and the health of populations by combating misinformation and developing online learning interventions that improve people’s knowledge, skills, beliefs, and behaviours related to COVID-19. In particular, the effort uses a design thinking approach to (1) examine digital misinformation flows pertaining to the outbreak; (2) develop, test, and improve educational interventions to reduce the spread of online misinformation.

The objectives of this research effort are to (a) examine digital misinformation flows pertaining to the COVID-19 outbreak, (b) develop strategic public health communication via microlearning interventions to mitigate the spread of online misinformation, (c) evaluate the efficacy of these interventions across multiple global contexts, (d) iterate microlearning interventions in order to improve them and counter COVID-19 misinformation on online platforms, and (e) develop online dashboards tracking COVID-19 misinformation.

Information networks are changing people’s lives, for good and for ill. In what the New York Times and the World Health Organization (WHO) have described as an “infodemic,” COVID-19 misinformation has reached a fever pitch online. In response, many organizations, including the WHO, are attempting to combat viral misinformation by directing users to correct information surrounding the disease. Researchers however report that providing information on an issue is rarely enough to lead to large-scale behavioral changes. Access to information does not automatically result in changes in public attitudes or behavior, which means that the public education efforts of organizations like the WHO may be drowned out by a tidal wave of bad, inaccurate, or poorly understood information. To combat this issue, it is necessary to also provide microlearning interventions that lead to actual learning, measured as changes in people’s knowledge, skills, beliefs, and behaviours. For microlearning interventions to have such impact they must be engaging, authentic, relevant, and come from people who have influence within their communities. Microlearning should employ a variety of techniques such as narrative and personalization, and must resonate with the needs and values of communities, rather than with academic or government experts.