This week, we’re talking about Microlearning! Microlearning is a unique approach to training with a key focus on delivering bite-sized educational material to students in short bursts.
Typically, microlearning courses are no more than five minutes, and tend to focus on specific topics that can be taught in a short time. The approach isn’t limited to one type of teaching, either. It can take the form of text, video, audio, quizzes, games, and more.
More and more organizations are turning to microlearning to train their employees and suppliers because of the significant advantages it offers to both students and administrators.
Let’s look at some of the ways microlearning can enhance training from a worker perspective:
How Microlearning Benefits Employees
It’s flexible. Microlearning courses are designed to be completed in minutes, and that means employees can easily fit them in with primary responsibilities. Whether it’s watching a brief video in between tasks or filling out a short quiz on a specific topic, the microlearning method helps employees get up to speed on a subject without disrupting their existing workflows.
It’s accessible. Microlearning is primarily done online, but its short-form content can be designed for smartphones, laptops, tablets, and other portable electronic devices. Organizations can administer site-specific training directly to workers’ devices since employees typically have these on hand to complete their projects. And since the courses can be accessed from anywhere, employees that require training have the option to use the device best suited for their personal learning style.
It’s engaging. Social media, notifications, breaking news, emails - they’re all fighting for your attention. That feeling of being pulled in many directions is a common sentiment amongst today’s workforce - and it’s tanked our ability to focus on anything for more than a few minutes. Microlearning keeps things engaging by never overstaying its welcome. By the time you feel your focus drifting, the training is complete. Best of all, studies show that short, self-contained lessons boost student knowledge retention, so employees aren’t sacrificing understanding in favor of saving time.
How Microlearning Benefits Employers
It’s agile. Educators will tell you that successfully building a workplace training curriculum can take years of preparation and massive resource allocation. Many organizations can’t allocate the time to overhaul an entire training program if updates need to be made to course content. Microlearning classes can be developed significantly faster than traditional e-learning, and small procedural revisions are the ideal topic to deliver in this form. These types of courses are also easy to update, should the need arise.
It’s affordable. Microlearning’s ease of modification and short-form approach doesn’t just increase an organization’s flexibility to train its employees. It also offers significant cost savings due to its shorter development cycle. And most learning management content editors can handle microlearning, which means you don’t need to spend on specialized software to start curating short-form courses.
It’s measurable. One challenge of traditional e-learning approaches for organizations is measuring the effectiveness of their training. By breaking complex topics down into 3-5 minute blocks, companies can better understand which part of the material is most engaging and effective to their workers. It also paints a better picture of employee gaps in knowledge: if a specific course has low completion rates, it suggests the material may need to be revised, or that more focus needs to be put on that subject.
More Resources
While the concept of microlearning has been around for years, we’re now seeing more businesses around the world use it as a means of training employees and suppliers. And since it benefits workers as much as organizations, it’s easy to see why adoption has skyrocketed.
If you want to learn more about microlearning, you can read an article on the topic here.
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