9 Ways For Mastering Microlearning

9 Ways For Mastering Microlearning
Summary: You want your training to have an epic impact, but that doesn't mean it has to be colossal in size! Read on and find out how to keep your training short and sweet!

Mastering Microlearning In Online Training: 9 Ways

Learning things in small chunks isn’t new. If you’ve ever learned a new language, you’ll understand. You wouldn’t learn French by sitting down to read the complete Proust [1] – you’d learn a short phrase here and a new verb there and, over time, you’d gradually master the language.

These days, it’s more important than ever to make training content that learners can access and consume quickly. Few people have the attention span, the time, or the patience to sit through massive training units. With technology advancing at dizzying speed, your organization probably doesn’t have the budget to pay an eLearning company every time your learners’ skills become outdated and obsolete.

With the advent of smaller, more powerful technology, it’s easy to create bite-sized content in-house. All you need now is the knowledge and skills to develop microlearning that gets results. Luckily for you, you’ve come to the right place!

1. Know Your Goal

Before you start, it helps to know where you want to end up. What is the training need that you want to address? It’s all too easy to assume that you know what you’re aiming for, but unless you do the research, you won’t be certain. Make sure your goal is the right goal, and don’t create training that you don’t really need, when there may be more urgent skill gaps that need to be plugged.

2. Speed Up The Creation Process

One of the benefits of microlearning is that it lets you roll with the punches of an ever-changing world. You need fast and flexible tools that won’t slow down the creation process. If a new training need appears on a Monday morning, you should have the tech to deal with it by Tuesday morning. Look for a simple, uncomplicated authoring tool that will let you quickly create training without a prohibitively steep learning curve.

3. Get The Right Delivery Method

Let’s say you’ve built the perfect microlearning course to address your training needs. It defeats the purpose if your learners can’t access it easily. It’s possible that a desktop-based solution will do the trick for your learners, but in all likelihood, they’ll be more comfortable accessing it on their mobile devices. Make sure your Learning Management System, and the content, is mobile responsive at the very least. Better still, invest in a mobile learning app that’s designed specifically for microlearning content.

4. Create An Outline

Despite its many flaws, the traditional training approach has one advantage over bitesize content – it’s easier to keep track of ten huge units than it is to manage a hundred micro units. This is only an issue if you stumble into the project without a concrete plan. Draw up an outline showing how all the parts connect to each other. There are many mind-mapping apps [2] online that you can use to keep your ideas in order, or you could simply stick to good, old fashioned pen and paper. Just make sure your paper is big enough to contain your ambitions!

5. Focus On A Single Point

Once you start plotting out a piece of learning collateral, it can be tempting to veer off on a tangent to add more context. Though your heart is probably in the right place, tangents like these will kill your microlearning dead! The beauty of microlearning is that your learners are free to explore additional content if they want to. It’s up to you to keep each item focussed on a specific learning outcome. This will help you to keep the units bite-sized, and it’ll help your learners understand and retain each point.

6. Be Ruthless When Editing

Blaise Pascal famously said "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time". In your first draft, you can write as much as you like, but the bigger challenge is trimming and shaping that content into its most concise and succinct form. There’s no room for corporatese in microlearning, so don’t utilize something when you can just as easily use it. Instead of providing your learners with the solutions to maximize their efficiency, simply give them the tools to do their jobs better. For every word you write, ask yourself this: "If I delete this, will the message be the same?". If the answer is "yes", delete without mercy!

7. Use Images And Graphs

If somebody has never seen a bicycle before, how many words do you think you’d need to describe it? Once they’ve read your description, do you think they’d have a clear picture of a bicycle in their mind? You could save yourself and your learners a lot of time and effort by simply showing them a picture of a bicycle. The same goes for any message you need to convey. If you can communicate an idea more easily with an image, don’t waste precious time describing it in words.

8. Know Your Learners

We’ve looked at condensing your message into a tidy, bite-sized package. You can see by now that microlearning is largely about what you don’t include. If you don’t know who is on the receiving end, you might end up removing all the wrong parts. The learners need to understand what you create, and that’s only possible if you understand your learners. For example, if you’re training people who work in a video games store, you could have a lot of success by drawing comparisons between their work and their favourite video games. If you use the same approach in an accountancy firm, you’ll probably end up with a lot of blank looks and confused learners.

9. Test And Tweak

Finally, you get to discover another huge advantage of microlearning. Since you’re interacting more regularly with your learners, you have more chances to see what effect the training is having. If a certain unit isn’t working the way you’d hoped, it’s not a big task to change it. You might also release a unit that has a huge response, and when that happens, it’ll be easier to work out why it resonated so well. Once you know that, you can do the same thing for all of the content. Pretty soon, your microlearning campaign will evolve into the perfect program for your needs and those of your learners.

Conclusion

When you embark on your first microlearning crusade, you’re not just training your own people – you’re retraining yourself in the art of communication. With every piece of bite-sized content you create, you’ll find it easier to zero in on the quintessential point of the lesson. You’ll have better visibility over the threads that connect every topic in your business, and more importantly, you’ll have more chances to understand your learners. In the end, all of these benefits will make your learning campaigns more effective and make you a better training manager!

 

References:

  1. Marcel Proust
  2. 24 Essential Mind Mapping and Brainstorming Tools

 

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