  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.
