Microlearning Effectiveness

In a dynamic and fast-changing corporate environment, employees need to use their time efficiently. When a problem arises, the employees are expected to resolve them quickly. Microlearning is a tool that provides the required information where and when such a need arises.

Microlearning helps employees pursue learning at their own pace. This empowers the employee towards operational excellence, thereby, improving efficiency and reducing the cost of training.

But all this is possible only if the bite-sized learning content engages the learner and helps close the knowledge gaps required to complete a job task.

Why microlearning?

Microlearning has become popular owing to the ability of the employees to learn and immediately apply job-specific concepts. The popularity of social media platforms like Twitter and YouTube have enabled organizations to rollout more focused and relevant training in shorter intervals.

Microlearning has struck a chord with the learning community in general, since it can convey the content in a shorter duration of time with rich-media formats that can be streamed across different devices, anywhere, anytime.

Before you start

Often, microlearning is misunderstood as merely a shortened version of an e-learning course. This is a misguided assumption since content from e-learning cannot be reused as is and will require extensive rework. Moreover, learners require access to the training content that can be consumed quickly.

Here are some activities one needs to perform to ensure that the microlearning course is developed efficiently and is rolled out effectively:

Plan the training goal
Before starting on the development, one needs to be sure about the goal you hope to achieve. Without a proper goal, you will end up developing training that you do not want and an urgent skill gap that is remains unplugged.

Speed up the development
One of the biggest benefits of micro-learning is that it can be developed quickly. Therefore, to help this process, you would need to use an uncomplicated authoring tool that will help you to create the training without much wastage of time.

Set up the delivery method
After building the microlearning course, it is equally important to have an efficient mode of delivery. If the learning management system (LMS) does not allow access to learners or if the content is not device-independent, then it defeats the whole purpose of development.

Create the blueprint
The best way forward is to create an outline of how all the pieces of content connect. This is important since one should not stumble into the project without a plan. Use mind-mapping apps or just plain paper-and-pen to the map the information.

Focus on a single objective
The best part of microlearning is that it offers focused, bite-sized content. This should be adhered to, strictly. It is often tempting to keep including additional content. Stay focused on developing content that will help achieve a single specific learning outcome.

Remove unnecessary content
It is equally important to be ruthless when it comes to removing content from the script. The challenge will be to make the content concise without losing the context. Keep the sentences short, the message crisp.

Use images and media
You can save the learners a lot of time and effort by replacing sentences and words with popular pictures. If the message can be communicated well with an image, do not waste the learner’s time by describing the same thing in words.

Understand the learner
The learning is effective only if the learner can relate to the content provided in the training. This is possible only if the developer understands the learner and the job tasks he or she performs daily.

Test and modify
The last and most important part of an effective microlearning module is the ability to see what impact the training is having on the learner and their work behavior. If something is not working while testing, it is easy to modify since it is not a major task to change these bite-sized chunks of information.

Microlearning is not just about keeping the content short, it is also about extensive planning, organizing and setting specific and achievable goals for the learners. With every bite-sized piece of content that you create, it will be easier for you to zero in on the essential points of the lesson.

To learn about training videos, read this: