3 Things You Did Not Know About Microlearning

It’s more than just an innovative method of delivering learning.

Last week, our CEO Carol Leaman delivered a webinar titled: Microlearning – Small Bites. Big Impact. During the course of the webinar, Carol explained what microlearning is, why it has become so hot, what to look for in a microlearning platform and how it is impacting organizations around the world.

Here are just three – of many – takeaways from the webinar, which highlight some points you might not know about microlearning:

It’s not just about turning 1-hour training sessions into 1-minute videos, it’s about driving continuous learning and lasting behaviour change.

Microlearning is more than just a method of content delivery, it’s a learning strategy that will help impact your business. According to Bersin by Deloitte, the modern employee only has 1% of their workweek (~5 mins a day, based on a 40-hour workweek), to devote to training and development. Microlearning helps you make the most of that 1%. If you scaled this across your entire organization, week after week, just think of the impact it could have.

Gamification and Microlearning are like two peas in a pod.

The simple truth is, if you’re going to deliver content in bite-sized chunks, it needs to be consumed more often. This just won’t happen if employees aren’t engaged. Since we’re close to the start of a new year, I’ll use the analogy of going to the gym. Let’s say you decide you want to get fitter, does it make sense to go to the gym twice a year for eight hours each time OR three times a week for twenty minutes each time? That answer should be easy. The tough part: motivation. This is why personal health devices such as the Fitbit have been so successful. They help motivate you by providing you with data, so that you can see progress and stay engaged. To tie this all back to learning, think of microlearning as your 20-minute workout, gamification as the Fitbit and the overall goal? Knowledge growth.

Microlearning allows you to identify knowledge gaps at the granular level, so you need a platform that helps you intelligently adapt.

Let’s suppose you and I sit in a training session that has been personalized to our roles within the organization. That’s a good start right? The content is already somewhat relevant to us. The issue is that you might remember certain points better than me and my lack of knowledge in a specific area might cause performance issues. It really becomes a problem when our managers realize there are performance issues and have us sit through the training again. Now it’s no longer relevant to you because you had no issues in the first place. An intelligent microlearning platform must be able to identify specific areas of weakness down to the individual employee and deliver learning at just the right time. This not only helps close specific knowledge gaps, but more importantly, it ensures learning stays relevant and performance does not suffer.

To learn more about the impact that microlearning can have on your organization, watch the webinar on-demand. Feel free to share your thoughts with us in the comments below or via Twitter.