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Consider your own learning style. What do you remember best? The information you were forced to receive at an inconvenient time and place or the knowledge you requested? Google Helpouts and TED-Ed are just two well-known examples of the reach microlearning have achieved. Savvy HR professionals should keep in mind the lessons their popularity has proven: Focused education suggested by the learner is more likely to result in changed behavior. After all, they asked for it.
In short, keep it short.
Three core principles ensure that this method of microlearning is consistently more effective than a traditional training course:
- Need – The employee requires the information immediately.
- Request – Information is accessed at the request of the employee, rather than dictated.
- Actionable – Knowledge can be immediately used, as seen in the “just in time” interview scenario above.
In this spirit, ELM Learning has designed these and other types of elearning for our clients with great success including:
- Short e-learning courses on 1 topic. For example, how to interview a disabled candidate.
- Brief soft-skill simulations that show 1 task. For example, how to fill out an expense report.
- Quick demonstration videos with 1 learning objective. For example, how to book corporate travel.
- Audio clips or staged presentation clips
- Speedy assessments and quiz questions
- Interactive PDF documents
- Informative blog articles
- Focused RSS feeds
- Educational games
- Fast reviews of FAQs and best practices
Microlearning is quickly becoming more prevalent in business-to-consumer communication as well. Consider the British Heart Foundation, a large non-profit that needed to educate the public about alternative CPR methods. To accomplish this they employed microlearning techniques in the form of promoted tweets and trends driving users to a short instructional video. The result? More than a million views, widespread media coverage, and word-of-mouth promotion throughout their target audience.
It’s clear that the corporate training and development sector is evolving and microlearning – both in and out of blended learning courses – is emerging as a prevalent training method across industries and around the world.
